Anthony Lawlor (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Connaughton stole my thunder with regard to quotas. I am a sheep farmer and I know all about quotas which were held back in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a quota determined how much money a farmer got.

The other night, I watched a satirical television programme from the 1980s called "Yes, Minister". The Minister, Jim Hacker, was trying to promote a woman within the civil service. There was a fight about quotas within the civil service. When he had secured the decision that the woman would be promoted, she decided she would not take the promotion but would go to work in the private sector. He said he had worked hard for her promotion, but her reason for refusing it was that she wanted to succeed on merit. My mother fought for many years to get into Dáil Éireann and she spent a short time here. She would not like to see women as token representatives in this arena. She would like to see women here purely on merit, standing here as equals with men and not as token gestures. I find it difficult to believe we should demean women by classifying them as a quota group. We should not demean women by placing them in a quota category.

While I welcome parts of the Bill, we should have waited until the constitutional convention to get a clear recommendation from it on the number of Deputies per constituency. We could have had Roscommon on its own with one or two Deputies instead of being cast aside. In Kildare, there are people in Monasterevin and the south of the county who have no affiliation with Laois whatsoever. If I talk to someone about football, Kildare and Laois are like Manchester United and Manchester City, we hate one another in that neck of the woods. It would be much better that we would be split in two and with the county clearly identified so people would know they were voting for a Kildare person. I know people who have moved to Laois and who have transferred their votes to Kildare so they can vote there.

I welcome parts of the Bill, although it does not go far enough. I hope the Minister takes on board some of my suggestions.

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