Ivana Bacik (Independent)

It is always an education to listen to Senator Mooney. His was a tour de force through the fascinating history of constituency boundaries.

It is useful we debate the issue of increased women's representation in the context of Senator Power's amendment. As Senator Mooney said, I have had a long interest in this issue since I was elected in 2007 and authored a report for the Oireachtas justice committee on women's participation in politics in 2009. It was subsequently debated in the House and Senators Mooney and White were supportive of my recommendations, as were all parties.

As Senator Power said so eloquently, we have an appallingly low level of women's representation in politics. We languish around the 70 and 80 mark on the world league tables, well below the European average. We never took positive action to address this. That is why I am delighted the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government recently announced legislation will be forthcoming to ensure political parties will be required to field a minimum proportion of candidates of each gender, as recommended in our 2009 report. Will the Minister of State give more details about the timeline for the legislation's publication?

The main obstacles to women's participation, known as the five "Cs", have been well rehearsed in this debate. Women tend to have less access to cash, lack confidence, less access to child care and run up against the old boy's culture and candidate selection procedures in political parties. As Senator Power pointed out, in some constituencies party activists are often presented with a restricted choice of all-male candidates. The legislation announced by the Minister will facilitate greater voter choice by allowing more women candidates go to the electorate. In Belgium and Spain, the introduction of such provisions increased the number of women elected to parliament.

I must pay tribute to Senator Mooney for his book with Maedhbh McNamara, Women in Parliament: The Irish Experience 1918-2000, an excellent resource. This Seanad has the highest representation of women of any Seanad with one third of Members women. Six out of 12 Members of the Labour grouping are women. This is a sign of how a positive will to change can be successful.

While I am grateful to Senator Power for tabling this amendment, I am not sure it addresses the real cause of the problem of women's participation in elections. A Council of Europe report on the impact of different electoral systems on gender representation pointed out no particular one disadvantages women notably. Somewhat surprisingly, because I certainly thought our electoral system might be an obstacle, that was not the finding of the Council of Europe. The national list system, that Senators Power and Mooney have mentioned and that I would also favour, might provide a better vehicle for women, but there is no strong evidence that larger constituencies within the current electoral system would provide a greater opportunity for women. The far more significantly important reform is the one to which the Government is committed, that is, the reform to provide for political parties to select more women.

The evidence is less clear-cut for reforming the electoral system to increase the numbers of women elected. Short of providing for the national list system described, the evidence is certainly not clear that larger constituencies, in themselves, would have the result that Senator Power and I, and I think all of us, want to see, which is, increased numbers of women elected to the Dáil and to the Seanad.

I do not want to prolong the debate unnecessarily, but I am glad we are having this debate. I hope we will have more debate on this topic in the autumn.

Others have mentioned the glass ceiling. I always prefer the phrase "the sticky floor", to which women tend to be stuck in the political system as elsewhere. Our mission is to try to unstick women from that floor and get women raised up through the echelons of power.