Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is fascinating to follow this discussion. This committee is starting to look at what beyond quotas will look like. The question of what happens when 50% or 50 plus one is reached needs to be considered. We are still a long way off that in many places but it is about that idea of sustainability. I was at the unveiling of a portrait of Kathleen Clarke, the first woman Lord Mayor of Dublin City two weeks ago. Hers is the first portrait of a woman to be placed in City Hall, which is quite breathtaking when you think about it. When my daughter came into the chamber one day she said to me that there were no portraits of women on the wall. There is that whole great movement of women on walls and so on. This has an impact and the idea of leadership is probably the least tangible of all of the recommendations. It is harder to get your hands around it but it is really important, so I am 100% committed to it and to the issue of quotas at the general election.

What I would like to ask about is the practicality of quotas and balance on air and how we do that over a longer period. For example, I really welcome maternity leave for women in local government. That Bill is really important as are some of the work-life balance improvements we have brought in.

We need to keep women over more than one term. I am not as good a Deputy as somebody who has been here for two or three terms. I was certainly a better councillor during my second term than my first term. On Dublin City Council, the Social Democrats, the Green Party and Fianna Fáil have a majority of women. I worry that a strict quota might mean we need male quotas. The difficulty with that is that a quota will be met. I am not advocating for a male quota as the legislation already does that but what I am saying is that women need to be empowered over two terms. We cannot let them face an artificial barrier at the end of their first five years because of their gender. It would be perverse. We need to look at how we do that. It needs to be broader than one local authority and we need to do it across the whole country. There are local authorities with no women. Offaly County Council, for example, has no woman councillor, which is bizarre. We need to give a little thought to how a local election gender cap would apply. We have had that discussion here. We had it with the Taoiseach last week as well.

More supports are definitely needed for parents and for those impacted by childcare, male and female, at local authority level. We insist on it being a part-time position, although it is far from it. There are always going to be calls on childcare needs in that balance. We need to do more than just gender. We need to have the supports.

My question is for Ms Duffy and it touches on the same point. In the last week or two we have had much discussion around editorial independence on radio programmes and so on. How do we ensure that we have editorial independence but also see the idea of balance in programmes? Twenty years ago, there were programmes, like Gay Byrne's and Gerry Ryan's programmes, where 95% of the contributors might have been female, but all of the radio hosts were male. How do we make sure that we have that balance for producers, researchers and editors, but by the same token see the output of more women in the public eye?