Ms Maria Joyce:

I thank the Chair and, as with the other organisations, we welcome the opportunity to present to the committee on the key issues raised by the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality on leadership in politics, public life and the workplace.

In advance of today’s meeting, I reviewed the recommendations of the report again. They are solid strong recommendations which. if implemented, could increase the number of women in politics. I say "could" because they need to be implemented. Unfortunately, they would not address the needs of Traveller women and other minoritised women and would serve to further marginalise us.

As we outlined in our submission, Traveller women experience significant exclusion from decision-making and wider political processes due to discrimination and marginalisation. There is a real need for Traveller women to have an attainable opportunity to participate in spaces of power and decision-making. This includes the need to value our expertise and knowledge in political and broader public spheres and to ensure those who hold public office are held to account for racist and sexist comments about Travellers.

Earlier this year, we published the report, Different Paths, Shared Experiences: Ethnic Minority Women and Local Politics in Ireland.

The research was prepared by Professor Pauline Cullen and Mr. Shane Gough. We collaborated with Akina Dada wa Africa, AkiDwA, and the link to the research is available in the submission we made to the committee. Professor Cullen and Mr. Gough also made a submission to this committee outlining key aspects of the research and what needs to be addressed. The report calls for women candidate quotas for Irish elections to incorporate a quota for ethnic minority women to help tackle the issue of our under-representation in elected office. Under-representation is an understatement. We do not have Traveller women at national level in politics other than Senator Eileen Flynn, the Taoiseach's nominee, which was greatly welcomed. She is doing a fantastic job and we continue to wish her well but we need to make greater strides.

The research shows that for Traveller and other minoritised women campaigning and canvassing were found to be a mixed experience, positive in some respects but at times discouraging. Experiences of abuse ranged significantly from racism and sexism online and offline, to sustained in-person racist and sexist harassment, abuse and intimidation. The minoritised women who took part in the research shared experiences of exclusion from electoral politics at the same time as they engaged in essential political work in building our own communities.

For Traveller women, community activism was more likely to be with our own community with less involvement in majority community organisations. This work is less recognised as leadership or political work and is not usually where political parties look to when recruiting candidates, and when I say less recognised, not by Traveller women or the community in terms of their leadership roles, their advocacy and their political and policy work in various consultative committees in relation to Traveller policy issues at local, regional and national levels. The research indicates that the range of current interventions to increase the number of women in local politics will increase gender parity there, but will not deliver the change required for minoritised women to access local politics, such as the issue of Traveller political participation, which remains the issue hiding in plain sight. Increasing Traveller women’s inclusion in local and national politics will require confronting the sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination in public life.

The report makes many recommendations across a range of areas, including: nested quotas, which I mentioned before, reserved seats, linking current State funding to parties to include a requirement to diversify their membership and candidate lists and to include ethnic minorities with gender parity in the Taoiseach’s Seanad nominees and for resources to be made available to achieve this.

Specifically on nested quotas, we want to see the inclusion of those from 2023 when the current national gender quotas for political parties increase from 30% to 40%. We would also call for the inclusion of nested ethnic quotas in any introduction of gender quotas at local political level going forward. We think it is essential to bring them in from the beginning as opposed to trying to stitch them in afterwards which is always much more difficult to do.

Before I finish, I would like to reflect again on the recommendations that the committee is deliberating on and to ask what the limits are in terms of the committee's ambition for women in politics in Ireland. We want the committee to push further and produce work that has the scope to make the Irish political landscape much more diverse than it is today. We need the committee's recommendations to specifically name Traveller women to ensure equality of outcomes for Traveller women from the work that this committee will produce. While we recognise that Traveller ethnicity in the Dáil was a significant issue in 2017 when it was recognised, there continues to be significant barriers to healthcare, adequate and culturally appropriate accommodation, equality of outcomes from education and meaningful work for Traveller women and girls in this country.