Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is absolutely not my thinking. On the issue of gender balance within my ministerial team, as the Deputy knows we select our Ministers from Parliament. It is different in other countries, where Ministers may be selected from outside Parliament. Of the 12 female Deputies who support this Government, seven are Ministers, including the Tánaiste and five women who sit at the Cabinet table, and two are committee chairs. Nine of the 12 hold promotional paid positions within the Government. I would like that figure to be much higher because I believe that diversity leads to better decision making but the best way that I can do that is to increase the number of female Deputies who support the Government. If I could increase the number of female Deputies supporting the Government from 12 to 24, I could have 14 or 18 female Ministers, and that is much closer to the position that I would like to be in. What I would like, of course, is total gender equality, but even if I appointed all female Deputies to ministerial office, including those only elected last year, it would still only amount to one third. The real problem we have in this House is that there are not enough female Deputies. My party has more female Deputies than any other party but it is still far fewer that we should have.

In anticipation that this question might come up, I had a look at the gender composition of the Sinn Féin Front Bench, which has four female members from 18 positions. That is slightly worse than what we have around the Cabinet table, in case the Deputy had not noticed.

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