Ms Caitr?ona Gleeson:

We understand and know social media to be a magnification of lifelong abuse, unfortunately, towards people in public life in particular. There are ways this can be changed with regard to the responsibility and accountability for the platforms that facilitate it and do not manage reporting in an effective way. There is the tick-box management of reporting and then there is the effective management of it.

I do not wish to use the word "training" but the mechanisms should be there to support women in public life to be able to boundary what it is their are exposed to. I am on the advisory committee for Meta for women's safety and I am witnessing how there is potential for algorithms to stop the abuse coming. It should not be there but one of the problems is that we are dealing with a very racist, misogynistic and homophobic world and this is escalated most with bots, trolls and real people doing this online.

People should be sanctioned with prosecutions through the legislation we have in place already, of which there is more coming in. We are trying to change the behaviour. The platforms can do more but it is the behaviour we are trying to change. Sanctions are quite critical and their public profiling is also important.

With regard to the culture change, in the year and a half since I have come in, I am hearing great commitment from national party levels. I am seeing great work being done across all the parties and commend that. I wish to put that on record. However, I am also seeing resistance. From 20 years of working on responding to gender inequality in Ireland, I know the subtle resistance. I know the smile.

What we actually need to do is to address 100 years of the male quota and to call on all our male colleagues, both within the party structures and outside them, to look at male privilege. Unfortunately, this is going to require men who may have aspirations to run or to run again to see if they really want to have a changed democracy. Can we start to see men put their hands up and say they will stand aside and create the space for an equally competent woman to be supported to run in a winnable seat? That is the sort of shift that we will need. Some 44 incumbents in the Dáil will need to vacate their seats for us to get to 50:50 representation. That is what it amounts to. It is that kind of real leadership that is needed from men who are incumbents but also from men within parties.

Asking women to run is really important. We have the Count Her In campaign running on that basis and encouraging people to look around them. Unfortunately, women still need to be asked. Many of the programmes we are working on are looking at breaking down that syndrome of needing to be asked. Some of the most successful female candidates had to be asked many times before they ran and we understand the reason. The work and more awareness within parties and the funding coming in around incentivising that should drive that more. We see some parties doing more than others. The longer established parties have a bigger mountain to climb, particularly in terms of incumbency.

On the rural commute, as someone who lives in a rural part of Ireland and has the revolving door parenting role running as we speak, that balance of being able to fulfil one's duties as a public representative and one's responsibilities as an employee and as a parent or a carer is something that is challenging when one enters public life but there are ways and we have referred to them a few times.

In terms of hybrid meetings, this meeting is a great example. They are not resourced as well around the country, so we need some more tech solutions around that. Dr. Maher touched on that earlier in terms of councils that are doing that well and I think Ms Reilly referred to it. At the moment women are having to advocate for these to be retained. There is a pushback coming in from some of the councils. Covid was a hard time for everybody but it showed us the potential to be more efficient, to be more effective with time and how to make it more accessible. That is why we refer to the constitutional reform we think is needed, based on the legal advice that is there. If those in the Parliament can be online and participate in meetings, there is no reason one cannot be online in Falcarragh, Belmullet, Killaloe or wherever one is outside Dublin and participate fully as a Member of the Oireachtas.

These are the issues we can address that we did not have to think about 100 years ago when we were designing a Constitution. They are within our grasp now. We really urge that shift which could happen if put the whole suite of measures together quite quickly.