Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Acting Chair, Deputy Mathews, is fastidious in how he does his job.

Massively greater female participation in politics should be at the heart of the reform process. It will take the wisdom of Solomon to achieve that objective but even in terms of current initiatives to reform this House, we should ask ourselves the extent to which we are recognising the need to pursue family friendly policies. I am not sure whether sitting until 5 a.m. is likely to be attractive to women, notwithstanding that the mother should not have to be the one who goes home to look after the children. When we consider greater numbers of sittings or pursue a policy that is focused on more time rather than more effective use of time, are we encouraging the participation of women? Fianna Fáil has established a group that is working assiduously under Senator Power to investigate, with some success, how we can encourage more people to become involved in our organisation. So poor is our performance on this issue that far fewer women are involved in politics than should be the case. The Minister said we are 24th in Europe although I thought we were 23rd. Many would argue that if we had more women Members when times were particularly difficult, we would have made different decisions. We might have anticipated some of the problems that were coming downstream. We should consider an all-party approach to encouraging the participation of women in all our political groupings and none - I am conscious that Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan is in the Chamber. Perhaps we are seeing an increasing number of people being attracted to the Independent political way of life, but that poses a challenge to the political parties to examine what we are doing and see how we can do our business better and more effectively and attract women to get involved. The body politic and the country as a whole would benefit enormously from increased participation of women.

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