Seanad debates

Tuesday, 27 April 2010

Women's Participation in Politics: Statements.

 

2:30 pm

Photo of Dan BoyleDan Boyle (Green Party)

Possibly for the first time in a debate in the House, I am acutely aware of my gender. This is no bad thing. At one stage a number of months ago, I was a member of a Seanad parliamentary team that had 50% female representation. Despite the fact our team has grown greatly, it now has zero female representation. This is not even slightly compensated for by the fact that this debate is being addressed and responded to on behalf of the Government by my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy White, who has also taken my place in the Green Party's Dáil parliamentary party, which I did not give up willingly. At least it points to something to which we, as a party, have always aspired.

I think of one of our founding members, Ms Maire Mullarney, a formidable woman who believed obstacles were not there to be overcome, but to be bulldozed through. It has not been typical of the early history of our party. When we first stood candidates in the 1992 election, we had two women out of seven candidates. The first large-scale representation of candidates for the Green Party, then called the Green Alliance, was 25 years ago in the local elections of 1985 when there was either close to equality or maybe even a majority of women candidates. While I was neither a member nor a candidate during those elections, one of the prime reasons so many women were recruited to stand was that many of them did not believe they would be elected. This said something about people who wanted to make a statement through standing for a particular set of beliefs, but who were unwilling or unable to take on whatever would follow in terms of added commitments.

This issue has been identified in many reports and in this debate as being one of the main problems. It has been expressed as confidence, one of the five C's, namely, the ability to enter a structure and make a difference in such a way that there are adequate support structures. At local government level, the Green Party has an admittedly small base, but approximately one third of our elected representatives are female. With the exception of one town council in Carrickmacross, they have the added disadvantage of being single individuals and, therefore, they lack appropriate support measures.

The other responsibility, that of child care, is a societal problem. It is a burden that is still unfairly shared and we, as a society, must address this issue in a more focused way. People who are elected have faced additional burdens, even though we have improved the situation in terms of crèches and the like. I remember the experiences of two of my colleagues at different levels of representation, Ms Claire Wheeler of Dublin City Council and Ms Patricia McKenna, formerly of the European Parliament. In the mid-1990s, neither institution provided facilities for breastfeeding children. It is a shaming indictment of society that we were still addressing such issues because of a lack of representation, understanding and support structures.

Given the nature of our political system, the largest impediment remains cash. It is no great source of pride to say that, even in the field of paid employment with equivalent work positions, women are still being paid less. Given the other obstacles that must be overcome, the ability to have access to money to run political operations and to take part in campaigns is, for men and women, one of the main determinants of election success.

It is in terms of culture that we are probably in most need of greater female representation in politics. Irish politics is male-centric, confrontational and seems built upon a style whereby the more the chest is beaten, the more the political point is made. We need a politics that is consensual, inclusive and better able to address the issues at hand. Since we lack a critical mass of women in political structures, our sense of prioritising which issues should be addressed is wrong and we have a mismatch of resources in terms of how those issues should be dealt with. We must be honest enough to admit this as a society.

The essence of today's debate has been candidate selection procedures. While my party has good intentions and has not performed as well as we would have liked, we have had two MEPs out of 15 in Ireland. This is the area on which we most need to focus attention. I am not speaking in respect of the report alone. Rather, we need to examine our voting system. The Joint Committee on the Constitution is examining whether we should have a different electoral system. The German Green Party has a closed list system, although many people would not be happy to have it. The list is 50:50 with the woman candidate listed first. This system applies to national and European elections. Last year, I met an excited young woman in Freiburg who had managed to be the 13th Green Party representative on the European list because that is the way the list is structured. It has a European Parliament presence of seven women and six men. The leader of the Green Party in Finland, the Finnish Minister of Labour, is a woman. The leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, who is likely to win the first Green Party seat in the Westminster elections next week, is a woman. These are the examples towards which we need to strive.

Regardless of the question of whether we should adopt a different electoral system or try to work within the current system, the difficulty is still that we are not translating what is on the ground into bringing women forward. Throughout the day in between monitoring debates and participating on the Order of Business, I have made several calls to the area I represented in the Dáil and spoke with a number of activist groups - a local schools committee, a health group, a Traveller group and a community development group. In each of those cases, the key person through whom information was being passed and to whom I, as a public representative, was obliged to respond in respect of concerns raised was a woman.

Why do such women, who work at the level to which I refer and who are involving in setting the political agenda, occupy these positions? Never mind international representation, the involvement of these individuals is not even being translated into representation at local government level. This comes down to a lack of support structures and the fact that there are comfort zones within local communities within which people can operate. I am of the view that such comfort zones relate to the traditional system and to incumbent political representatives who are, in the main, male.

As a society, we must ensure the latent political activism which exists among women is translated into proper and appropriate representation at all levels of government. We have a distance to go in this regard. However, I am confident that debates such as that in which we are engaging and the reports that were issued by the sub-committee will ensure we will make up the ground. There is a great deal of catching up to do and I hope we can do this catching up in the shortest possible period.

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