Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry South, Independent)

I do not want to eat into any of the time allocated to the Private Members' motion on domiciliary care allowance, which is very important to many families.

The Bill deals with the two key areas of political funding and the chronic under-representation of women in the political system. We must make strong efforts to bring about improvements in these two areas because of their importance to the system as a whole. The Bill is a blunt instrument in achieving gender balance. Any reasonable measure to improve gender balance is right and proper. However, we need to look behind the numbers at the reason so few women offer themselves for election in the first instance. We must also scenario-test the 30% figure. What happens if a political party does not have the required 30% of women offering themselves for selection?

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