Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I want to salute the role of working women everywhere. In the pandemic, so many women were, and are, key front-line workers in health, education and retail. In many countries during the pandemic, it was women who carried the banner for workers' rights. In this country, they did so at Debenhams. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to express their grief and anger at the shadow pandemic of gender-based violence after the killing of Ashling Murphy. I say to Government Ministers that they should respect that grief and anger. I ask them to stop stonewalling the Women of Honour and not to push the goal of reaching the Istanbul targets on refuge places off to the medium or long term, when they report on them next month. Capitalism's cost of living crisis has shunted millions of women from the front line to the breadline. According to the World Economic Forum, if closing the gender pay gap was 99 years away according to trends in 2020, it had risen to 136 years by 2021. On our TV screens, we see 2 million refugees - the old, the sick, women and their children. We express solidarity with the women of Ukraine and all other refugees, who are often people of colour. It was the strike of women workers on International Women's Day 105 years ago in Petrograd that marked the beginning of the end of the great slaughter of the First World War, as well as the beginning of the end for both tsarism and capitalism. It is that system, the system of capitalism, which lies at the root of women's oppression in the world today, through gender-based violence, economic inequality and war. On this International Women's Day, socialist feminists renew our commitment to fight for women's rights and to fight against that system which has denied those rights for so long.

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