Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

While I appreciate the Minister's sentiments, 100 years after women got the vote one must say when one looks at the Department of Finance that the old cliché, "male, stale and pale" comes immediately to mind. Both Secretaries General of the Department - admirable persons, I am sure, in their own right - are men. As the Minister stated, when one adds up the totality of staff in the Department, the men occupy a disproportionate number of the senior positions while women are congregated in the lower pay scales and grades.

The issue with this is the Department of Finance, if we are to have it reflect the lived experience of people in Ireland, needs to have, both in its leadership and at all levels of the Department, a roughly proportionate equality between men and women. I know what it is like to sit in a Cabinet where only four persons around the table of approximately 18 persons are women. The Minister should believe me when I say that for every extra gain one makes in a women, one changes the conversation and the lived experience of those who are making the decisions.

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