Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Tomorrow, 14 December, is the 100th anniversary of the general election which saw the First Dáil in 1919. It was a significant election on so many levels, not least the fact it was the first general election in ten years and it occurred just over one month after Armistice Day, when the war to end all wars stopped. It was an election that saw the size of the electorate increase from 700,000 voters to 1.93 million by extending the franchise, albeit a franchise limited to women over 30, with specific conditions, and to all men over 21.

It is worth noting that voters were galvanised by anti-military and anti-conscription sentiment throughout the country. One woman, Countess Markievicz, was elected to that Dáil and became a Minister. Unbelievably and unfortunately, it took 60 years before we had another female Minister, when a fellow Galwegian, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, was appointed. From the First to the Thirty-second Dáil, we have gone from one female Minister out of 105 Members to 35 female Deputies, including Ministers, out of 158.

The glaring absence of female Deputies in the intervening 100 years has had profound and detrimental consequences for women and society in general. It led to a complete absence of open and balanced public discourse on subjects of vital importance. Indeed, successive male-dominated Governments worked hand in hand with a male-dominated Catholic hierarchy to shape a society that reflected their narrow and limited version of morality. They created an Ireland that was unequal and positively hostile to women and mothers. It gave us the Ireland of denial, deception and deceit in which church and State worked hand in hand with the male-dominated medical profession to defeat the most basic mother and baby scheme in 1951. It created the Ireland of the institutions, the legacy of which we are still dealing with. It was the Ireland of the Magdalen laundries, industrial schools and mother and baby homes. It gave us the Ireland of inequality which allowed men up to 65 to disinherit their wives completely. It permitted a marriage bar under which married women had to leave their jobs. It did not consider women fit to sit on juries until the very courageous Máirín de Burca took her case in 1973. It was an Ireland that thought it was acceptable to interfere in the marital privacy of the bed, forcing a very courageous woman, Mrs McGee, to go to the Supreme Court which led to the Irish solution to the Irish problem of 1979. I could go on and on but will restrict myself to a couple of other issues. Marital rape was unrecognised until 1991 and the eighth amendment took 35 years to remove from the Constitution. Deputies, particularly female Deputies, have a duty to recognise what has gone before and to shape a different Ireland in which a home and public health are basic human rights. We must be a voice for peace in circumstances in which we are shaping up, 100 years after a war, to have a European army.

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