Ms Gillian Harford:

I thank Senator Higgins for her question. I fully appreciate her position. It is one I get presented with on a regular basis. When we talk about voluntary targets, we are very glad that it is seen as inspirational but that is not the position in which we talk about them. We talk about them in terms of being an absolute requirement for responsible and sustainable business in Ireland. This message is reinforced by employees, by investors and by the wider stakeholder group. We are all in agreement that we need to go beyond the level we are at but we see it as a good opportunity to think about how we get there.

As the Senator rightly said, the EU directive was in discussion for a very long time. It has only come to fruition recently and when the directive talks about 40%, it talks about 40% of non-executives but 33% across the full board. In terms of the ISEC 20, we have already got there.

Our challenge with quotas is that they only apply to a very small number of organisations. These are typically listed organisations, which is a small market in Ireland in terms of employers. We also have the advantage in Ireland, unlike some of our European counterparts, that we did not jump to quotas a number of years ago. We are still on a learning curve. We have the opportunity to see how other European states have progressed.

In our submission, we talked about Norway. Eight years after Norway introduced its laws on quotas at board level, there were no female CEOs in the country's 60 largest companies. There was no data to demonstrate that board quotas had achieved anything in terms of senior executive progress for women, of higher pay or better conditions for women throughout the pipeline. In fact, a number of Norwegian companies de-listed in order to meet the quota. Alternatively, they took women out of the executive world into the board world and many executives filled a number of positions which impacted further down the pipeline.

We are not saying quotas are not an option but we are saying they are the last option. We really want Irish business to do this in a very sustainable way. We would like to think that companies on the ISEC 20 have already committed to that. We have seen quite a number of our larger organisations already exceed 40% across their full board against 33% in the EU directive. We also welcome the fact that Ireland is looking to the position in the EU because that is where we compete. However, many European countries that have not had quotas and have not had targets are very far behind the Irish experience and we see the directive as being really important in terms of raising the playing field where we are already starting to show progress.

Please do not underestimate our views in terms of them being anything other than all of us looking for the right result at the end of the day. We would like this done in a sustainable way. A quota can be met today but how will the quota be met in five or ten years if we are not working within industry to build the pipeline? We believe in organisations stepping up and being required to be accountable. This could be through what might be described as soft quotas through balance for better business. Alternatively, it might be set target in terms of how they go about it. We believe these strategies would bring better and more sustainable results for Irish women in the voice of business.