Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes. We have time if the witnesses have time.

Could Ms Duffy from Women on Air elaborate on the year-long monitoring project and how that would work? She says it would concentrate on a number of key high-audience programmes in public and independent sectors. We all appreciate her point about how useful and valuable it would be as a way of gathering data and of illustrating the affinity bias we see that Ms Coyle referred to where men look to other men to endorse their points. It would also illustrate Deputy Carroll MacNeill's last point that when there are relatively few women - fewer than one quarter of Deputies are women as there are only 37 of us - there is an undue burden on the individual women in terms of having to always step up to represent women in the media. We must be conscious of that. It is the same in any sector. When women are under-represented on boards there is also an undue burden on the individual women in business. I remember colleagues in academia speaking bitterly about the requirement for gender balance on interview panels and what a huge burden that placed on senior women in an organisation when there were very few of them in any university. This is a real issue and we need to widen the pool, which is why the media training is so important to ensure that the burden does not always fall on women, as Deputy Carroll MacNeill has just noted. How would the year-long monitoring project for Women on Air work?

My next question is for the National Traveller Women's Forum. I want to ask Ms Joyce more about the nested quota model she talks about. I presume she is not just speaking about that within a gender quota because, again, the bias falls on women to be more diverse as a group. It is clear there is a real issue with lack of representation for ethnic minority men also. How would that quota work in order that it would not just be nested within a gender quota but would apply across both genders, if one likes?

I take issue with the 30% Club's characterisation of quotas. I am a little concerned about that. The citizens' assembly was very clear in its recommendations under this heading, in particular recommendation 21 on boards. They are looking for gender quota legislation whereby funding would be contingent on reaching a quota, just as they are clear in recommendation 20 on the need for quotas in political representation. In 2009, I wrote a report on women's participation in politics for the justice committee that paved the way for the introduction of the quota legislation in politics in 2012. In our report we identified five Cs, that is, the obstacles that hold women back from participation on the airwaves and in public life generally. They are a lack of confidence, cash and childcare; an old boys' culture, which goes to the point made about cultural barriers, and then candidate selection procedures in political parties, which obstruct women's progress. Our recommendations were all targeted towards addressing the five Cs. What we found, on the basis of all the evidence we looked at and the witnesses who came before us, is that binding quotas would be required to enable women to rise above the existing structural barriers to women's participation.

The words "targets" and "quotas" are often used interchangeably but of course, the big difference is that a target is not binding or enforceable. The witnesses have characterised targets as setting out a floor and quotas a ceiling. In fact, our evidence was the other way around. The quota is the floor. That is the very minimum. Our quota is a gender-neutral quota in politics, obviously. It requires that political parties select no more than 30% - now rising to 40% - of their candidates of each gender. It is modelled on a Belgian law that was clearly effective in increasing the representation of women in the Belgian Parliament. It has already been effective in Ireland in increasing us from the abysmally low position of 16% up to the still far too low position of 23% in the Dáil.

I say all this because we really did interrogate this issue. The targets, by contrast, are a ceiling. They are an aspiration. Parties or companies are asked to aspire to reach a particular target. There is no penalty or sanction if they do not. Part of the success of gender quota laws everywhere, including Ireland, is that sanction. Parties lose 50% of their funding if they do not reach the quota. That is why all of us in political parties are really working hard to ensure there is a pipeline for the local elections in order that we can reach the 40% target of candidates in the general election, whenever it might be in 2024 or 2025. The pipeline really works with the quota. I really welcome the increase in numbers of women on boards, which the witnesses have illustrated. That is clearly very impressive and that has been done through the voluntary model but the evidence we had and the work we did in trying to move the numbers of women in politics up was that quotas were going to be the only way to achieve this, certainly if we have buy-in like the Scandinavian countries. Their big social democratic parties all adopted voluntary quotas and reached very impressive levels of women's representation. The political will here among the parties was not the same and, therefore, the statutory quota had to be addressed.

The point was made about why quotas are so important. As the witnesses said, even if we reach a sort of level of representation at board level, we still have the senior management level. Again, work I have done on women's representation in the legal profession revealed that higher levels of women's representation can be achieved among the Judiciary, but at the level of partners and solicitors' firms and senior counsel at the Bar, you will still have really low levels of representation of women. That is what we are seeing now.

I will make one final point. We need to be careful when we talk about tokenism. The argument that was always used against the introduction of the gender quota was that it would lead to token women. I have never seen or heard a token woman on the airwaves and have never seen or heard one who has been elected in politics. We have to nail that one. Visibility is crucial, as Ms O’Caoimh said. The visibility of role models to those 12-year-old girls and that notion that if a person cannot see it, he or she cannot be it, is so important. We need to have visibility of women. There is no such thing as a token woman.

My great friend Kathleen Lynch in Cork used to say that all her life, she voted for mediocre men and that just once, she would like the chance to vote for a mediocre woman. That is the reality. That is why we need quotas. I am sorry I have gone rather but I feel passionately about this. The citizens' assembly clearly endorsed the quota model rather than voluntary targets. Some comments on that would be welcome. I will go first to Ms Duffy from Women on Air on that question about the year-long monitoring project.