Ivana Bacik (Independent)

This sends out a very important message.

Other speakers, including the Minister, have referred to the report of which I was an author and with which I was ably assisted by Aoife O'Driscoll of my office. The report was adopted unanimously by the justice committee in 2009. The report deals with women's participation in politics. I am happy to say that instead of gathering dust, it has indeed fed into this legislation. I refer to the sub-committee hearings leading up to the publication of the report at which we heard numerous arguments, particularly from Professor Yvonne Galligan, about why we should be bringing in legislation like this. As she told us, the current lack of women candidates is a serious restriction to voter choice. She and others have identified the five Cs as the obstacles to women's representation, namely, child care, cash, confidence, culture and candidate selection procedures. As other speakers have said, we made a series of recommendations aimed at addressing problems of child care, difficulties with raising cash, the introduction of mentoring programmes and leadership training programmes to address women's lack of confidence. It is more difficult to address the cultural issue. We looked at examples from elsewhere, from Iceland, where a public advertising campaign was held with prominent politicians of each gender confounding gender stereotypes, with images of a male politician wearing high heels and a female politician Minister shaving in front of a mirror-----