Rónán Mullen (Independent)

It may very well be, she will have to go before Bishop Gilmore perhaps. In France they have only managed with the change in the law to achieve a 19% representation of women in their Parliament. She has pointed out that the countries that are frequently cited for having achieved greater participation of women in parliament, Sweden for example, have not done so with the aid of gender quotas.

Let me make it clear that I support much greater participation in politics and I would like to see many more women in the roles of Deputies and Senators. One does that in more thoughtful and less intrusive ways than by introducing gender quotas. One does it by helping to create more family friendly workplaces here, and by encouraging women's participation in political parties and by the political parties adopting measures to try to attract the best and the brightest and arranging meetings and structuring political activities to suit them. That is a much more mature way to go about solving the problem. It is all very well for Senator Mac Conghail to point to the excellent example he gave of the Abbey Theatre, and I accept the Abbey Theatre receives public funding, but he is essentially a private entity. One cannot compare that with party political life. This is the national Parliament and people should be given maximum choice in all the decisions that have to be made around the process of selecting public representatives. It is not a good idea for the national Parliament to engage in social engineering of this particular kind. This is not the way to advance women's participation. One can do at the cultural level, at one's own political level, but one does not foist one's particular ideological and political views on other parties. It is to be noted that it is in the ranks of the Independent members, where the political failure is most evident. Just look at the performance of political parties in terms of fielding women relative to the number of women who stand as Independents - one cannot do anything about that.

I am very sorry to be disagreeing with Members whom, on other issues touching on the dignity of women, I am very glad to share the road, for example, Senator Katherine Zappone, and I suspect she is a supporter of this Bill. I am very happy to walk the road with her on issues relating to prostitution and the sex industry.

I do not think this is good legislation in terms of advancing the interests of women. It invites scepticism and cynicism among the public about the quality of women's participation, that people should feel that the only way to get women into parliament is by this kind of attempt at a discriminatory mechanism. It is very ill-conceived. It is very interesting to note the number of Members who have felt the need to say that this is some kind of a necessary evil - - - - -.