Dr. Michelle Maher:

On the question of the commute, my county of Donegal comes to mind as well.

Regarding the Chair's reference to the Taoiseach's comment about whether quotas would help to overcome some of the other barriers, I would argue very strongly that they will. We have research that tells us women wait to be asked to run for election. When that request comes, it often comes quite late in the day, which means women do not have time to prepare. Sometimes, the whole election experience can be quite an adverse one for them.

One of the things that now exists, which the Chair asked about, is an action plan from our own perspective in rural Ireland. We were being asked by women in SHESchool is where do you start if you are not from a political party or if you are not from one of these political families where the council chair has been passed down from grandfather to father to son, which is sometimes what it seems like. If you are not in one of those families, where do you start? For the first time in Ireland, there is a starting point and a guidebook that is available to every woman in the country for free to show where to start. That speaks to the action plan. To complement that guidebook, there is a strong action plan, which started in November 2021 with ourselves. We started so early because we wanted to start asking women in 2021, which was years out from the local elections, to start thinking about running or about being part of a campaign team, to get behind a woman who may be an existing councillor or somebody who is new to politics and to start working on those foundations and on that groundwork for their election campaign. This is crucial in rural Ireland because who you are and your profile need to be established years out, not just from the election but from the selection conventions within the parties, which will be starting as early as next summer. Women did not know that they needed to be a member of a party to be able to have a vote for themselves. Of course, they do not need to be a member to be a candidate for it but they do in order to vote for themselves and to bring their own supporters into a party. That kind of information all feeds into the action plan whereby people put that foundation together and they then can start to build their campaign and canvassing strategies on a rock-solid foundation.

Dr. Buckley spoke about the balancing of the existing councillors. In the Women’s Regional Caucus, there is almost a political experiment going on. This is because for the first time, we have 42 female councillors across 13 largely rural local authorities. They were creating for themselves a new political institution within the structures of local government. They themselves had to slot into existing ways of doing business in county councils. These are ways of doing business that were established when a woman in there was as rare as hen’s teeth. They did not want to fall into a trap of just replicating the way councils do business. They were not afraid to experiment either and to see what worked. For example, plenary meetings are held online where possible and for women who cannot attend because of work outside of their council work commitments, there are summary catch-up meetings. Any voting is done electronically, with the period of voting being left open for eight or ten hours to allow everybody to participate. Where I am going with all of that is that things do not always have to be done the way they have been done. The family-friendly toolkit that was prepared by the National Women’s Council of Ireland by Sinéad Doody sets out much of that in detail with recommendations for local authorities. We would like those recommendations implemented.