Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a few concluding remarks and I will be erudite.

I thank Deputies Niamh Smyth, O'Reilly, Burton, Coppinger, Joan Collins, Catherine Murphy and Catherine Martin for their contributions to this important debate.

I noted the progress that has been made in providing equal opportunities for all but, as I stated earlier, we have a long way to travel. To this end, A Programme for a Partnership Government commits to develop a new integrated framework for social inclusion, which will outline measures to help eliminate any persisting discrimination on grounds of gender, age, family status, marital status, sexual orientation, race, disability, religion or membership of the Traveller community.

We are further committed to specifically empowering women by building on the legislation to encourage increased female participation in politics. An updated national women's strategy will further promote women's participation in decision-making. We will empower women to ensure that households headed by them are no longer at high risk of poverty. We will take measures to reduce the gender pay gap. These will include increasing investment in child care and reviewing the lower pay of women and gender inequality in respect of senior appointments. This Government is actively promoting: increased female representation on State boards to at least 40% - I am pleased to say that the average female representation on their boards of the bodies under the remit of my Department exceeds 50%; wage transparency and a strengthened role of the Low Pay Commission in relation to the gender pay gap and in-work poverty; training opportunities for self-development and work related skills, to assist a return to the labour market and promote entrepreneurship; and an increased level of female participation in the Defence Forces, with the goal of doubling the rate of participation from 6% to 12% over five years.

In the context of today's centenary, my Department is keeping in close contact with the Houses of the Oireachtas and the Vótáil 100 programme, which has a monthly programme of activity leading up to commemorating the First Dáil in January 2019. While it is clear that our own national journey failed women for far too long, today we pay our respects to all those women who flew the flag for women's participation in Irish political life in the years since Independence. In marking the distance that we have travelled in more recent years, I believe it is incumbent on us to remember them well, to cherish their contribution and to build on it into the future.

I will finish with a quote from Countess Markievicz, from March 1922, in a debate in the Dáil on the women's franchise:

This question of votes for women, with the bigger thing, freedom for women and opening of the professions to women, has been one of the things that I have worked for and given my influence and time to procuring all my life whenever I got an opportunity. I have worked in Ireland, I have even worked in England, to help the women to obtain their freedom. I would work for it anywhere, as one of the crying wrongs of the world, that women, because of their sex, should be debarred from any position or any right that their brains entitle them a right to hold.

Let us not forget those words. Gabhaim buíochas libh go léir.

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