Dr. Fiona Buckley:

Belgium was one of the countries Ireland looked to a lot in the course of the 2009 report. We looked at its model of a gender quota. At present it has a 50% gender quota and a party list system. Its incentive to comply is a list rejection mechanism. At present it has just under 43% women's representation. It is in 20th position in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's rankings for women's representation, whereas we are currently in 100th position. It is certainly easier to integrate a gender quota and a placement mandate in PR list system. We can see this in a number of countries in the EU 27 that have legislative gender quotas, such as Belgium, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia and Italy. They all have list systems and they are doing quite well in terms of women's representation.