Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have a daughter. I worry about her because she is a girl and because she is Irish. She has been born into a country with a record of treating women with disdain. She was born in May 2018, when the country finally put to rest a constitutional article, the eighth amendment, that forced 4,000 women a year to travel to England like criminals and others to order abortion pills over the Internet. That was in 2018, a full 50 years after the UK had determined that reproductive healthcare was a basic right for women. She was born to a grandmother who was forced to leave her public service job as soon as she got married. She was born in the year of the 100th anniversary of the first time some Irish women were permitted to vote but to a country whose Parliament is still only 22% female, and too many of these Deputies are subjected to vile online abuse.

I have a daughter. I worry she is a second-class citizen because Irish education still, too often, wants to separate her from boys. Some 17% of Irish primary school children are educated in single-gender schools. One third of our second level schools are gender-segregated. That is totally outside of the European norm, embedding gender stereotypes and restricting non-traditional subject choices, none of which has any basis in contemporary education research or best practice. In addition, 90% of all of these schools are under the patronage of a church that considers women to be second-class citizens.

I have a daughter. I worry she is a plaything for commercial interests. I worry there are highly-paid executives sitting in boardrooms, plotting and planning how best to sexualise her at an early age so they can make money out of her. I worry that this pressure will pile on top of her before she has the tools to deal with it, through the music industry, through the fashion industry, through the make-up industry. I worry that society will demand of her to have a smartphone, and that opens her up to a world of danger. I worry about the corporate determination to make her focus on her sexual power before she can access and appreciate her societal power, her community power, her civic power, her democratic power and, yes, even her commercial power.

I have a daughter. I worry she cannot see what she can be. What if she was to enter the business world? She lives in a country with a 14.4% gender pay gap, where female executive directors only account for 8.5% of the total and only one in nine CEOs are women. What if she chooses a career in academia? A 2018 Higher Education Authority report showed that while half of all lecturers in universities are female, these numbers fall dramatically at higher grades, such as associate professor, 32%, and professor, 23%.

I have a daughter. What if she was to take an interest in sport? Despite the success of the 20x20 campaign, how can I explain to her that the Irish women's soccer players get paid one fifth of what the Irish men get paid - that Katie McCabe’s blood, sweat and tears are worth only 20% of Seamus Coleman’s? How can I explain to her that national broadcasters still, for the most part, do not believe a woman can give an expert opinion on major sporting fixtures or, at a local level, that men's teams will still always be prioritised.

I have a daughter. Like all parents, I pray she will never be a victim of discrimination or hate, but I know life is tougher for female Travellers, female migrants, female prisoners, women with disabilities and women in recovery from addiction. I know that low-paid, vulnerable work is disproportionately carried out by women.

I have a daughter. She may herself have all the worries I have some day. She may herself one day be pregnant. She may still have to be treated in one of the outrageously dilapidated maternity hospitals in this city. She will have to deal with the fact that basic medication for Irish women in pregnancy can cost twice what it costs in the UK, that she will get no work leave for a miscarriage or medical complication related to reproductive healthcare, that free availability of period products is something that has to be battled for through a barrier of red-faced, male-oriented officialdom and that the provision of childcare is a national scandal, a scandal that persists because it disproportionately affects women, and poorly paid because it is disproportionately staffed by women.

I have a daughter. I want her to realise the power of girls around the world. I want her to know that a village can only change, a town can only change, a country can only change and the world can only change for the better when girls have access to education. The most powerful image in the world is a girl with a book. That image terrifies those who want things to stay the same.

I have a daughter. I want her to be proud to be Irish. I want her to learn of the generations of Irish women who made this country better for girls just like her - Countess Markievicz, Máirín de Burca, Eileen Desmond, Mary Robinson and Ivana Bacik. I want her not to be defined by the failings of others but to stand on the shoulders of these giants, and to take her place as an equal in this country and an equal in this world.

I have a daughter. I want her and girls like her not always to be thought of last. I want her to live in a country that has been designed for women and designed by women. I want her to redesign her own country for her, for us, for girls and boys that come after her, for my daughter and for all daughters to come.

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