Dr. Fiona Buckley:

I stated earlier that the possibility of ensuring greater gender balance and diversity on the Seanad panels may be through introducing a mechanism on candidate nominations and specifying that at least 40% must be women. If we want an incentive measure and if it is not financial, perhaps it could be a list rejection system or something of that nature. If the nominating bodies do not have a certain proportion of women, in this case we suggest 40%, we could go back and say the list will be rejected and to go away for a number of days or a week and come back with a gender balanced list. Perhaps this is a way of working around it.

I will follow up on what Ms Gleeson said about local elections. She mentioned that many people have been working on and speaking about local government and how we could operationalise the gender quota. As Ms Gleeson said we do not have the legal expertise or the constitutional expertise. We know that State funding of political parties is connected to their Dáil election performance. This is where finding a mechanism to work towards an incentive measure is coming from. It is also about tightening up. The 2019 arrangement was based on 30% or showing improvement in the direction of 30%. Certainly, we must be very clear if we go down the road of financial incentives that it is tied to 40% and that there is no question about it.

Where we do not have legal advice - and I do not know whether it is even possible, but I am throwing it into the mix - is on whether there is a mechanism to change how State funding of political parties is calculated. Could it be partly based on Dáil performance and partly on performance in local elections? I do not know. I am not quite sure. I do not have the legal expertise. This is thinking outside the box. Is this something that could be looked at? I have heard other suggestions about tying funding to the membership rate of women in political parties. Is this something that could be looked at?

It is quite interesting that there are no legislative gender quotas in the Scandinavian region. There are voluntary party quotas. Parties of the left originally introduced them and there was a contagion effect across the party system. Keeping this in mind, earlier we spoke about a possible role for SIPO or the electoral commission in publishing annual gender and diversity audits of political parties. If they must concede that they are not performing well, would having available this publicly declared information be an incentive in some respects for parties to attract a diverse base to party membership? Could funding be linked to women's party membership rates? Again, this would need more legal and perhaps constitutional research. I am afraid I am not able to comment any further. These are some suggestions I have seen or heard being spoken about to try to operationalise a form of quota for all elections.