Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the pleasure of welcoming the Minister to the House. I have had the pleasure of working with her in the past, as a woman lawyer, and I have shared platforms with her in that capacity. I am delighted to see her here in her new role as Minister. This is the first opportunity I have had to welcome her on the floor of the House.

I thank the Minister for spearheading the Government's programme to commemorate the centenary of women's suffrage. I also thank the Leader for facilitating this debate in the House on the centenary of women's suffrage. I thank him for giving us an opportunity to speak about the programme of events that the Oireachtas is organising under the heading of Vótáil 100. I have the pleasure and privilege of chairing the committee. I want to thank all of my colleagues for their kind remarks about the work of the committee. In particular, I thank my colleagues who are on the committee, Senators McFadden, Conway-Walsh and Higgins, and Deputies Catherine Martin and Fiona O'Loughlin. We have received huge cross-party support for the Vótáil 100 programme from colleagues in both Houses. I shall say a little more about the programme we have embarked upon in a moment. I am sure everyone will have seen the new badges to mark the centenary, which are based on the badges produced by the Irish Women's Franchise League. Everyone will receive a copy of the booklet that gives details on the programme of events.

As well as discussing the events that we are organising, I want to say a little more about the broader context for the commemoration of the centenary of suffrage, and others have spoke of this aspect too. For those who campaigned more than 100 years ago for women to have the right to vote, the vote was not an end in itself but a means to an end. The greater cause was to secure greater equality in society, which went beyond the right to vote and included such issues as sexual and reproductive health, equality in the workplace and freedom in one's personal life. I am confident that the women suffragettes that we are celebrating this year, like Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Constance Markievicz and others, would campaign alongside all of us on the Waking the Feminists campaign and the #MeToo movement, would challenge the gender pay gap, seek to achieve greater equality in the workplace and would campaign for reproductive health and so much more. It is worth remaking on those campaigns during this significant year for women's rights in Ireland, particularly as we embark on the forthcoming referendum campaign. As many of us said during the Order of Business this morning, we welcome the Supreme Court judgment handed down this morning. It gives us the necessary legal clarity to speedily bring forward the referendum legislation so that we can hold the referendum before the end of May this year.

I shall now speak about women's rights in a general context. Progress has been very slow on this issue over most of the past century. Despite the achievement of limited women's suffrage in 1918, it took another 60 years, after the appointment of Markievicz as the first woman Minister in an Irish Government, before Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was appointed Minister for the Gaeltacht in the late 1970s. Change has always been hard fought and hard won in the context of women's rights. We should not forget that as we celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage.

I shall speak briefly about the Vótáil 100 programme. As colleagues will be aware, the programme not only seeks to celebrate the achievements of women as Members of the Oireachtas and to celebrate individual women like Markievicz, it also seeks to highlight the lack of representation of women in politics today. Other colleagues have spoken about this matter, as has the Minister. Despite a very welcome increase since 2016, only 22% of Deputies are women and 30% of Senators are women, or 18 Senators are women out of a total number of 60 Senators. That number is still too low. Clearly, even with the gender quota rising to 40% in the election after next, change will only come about very slowly. We need to do more to encourage more women to enter politics and remove existing obstacles.

In 2009, I authored a report for the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Equality and Women's Rights. My report consider women's representation in politics and identified five barriers which have now become known as the five "Cs" that women encounter and impede their progress in politics. The five "Cs" are: lack of cash; lack of confidence; access to child care; culture; and candidate selection procedures. I know that women colleagues will recognise all of those "Cs". We have addressed the fifth "C" through the very welcome legislation that was introduced by the then Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Mr. Phil Hogan, following pushing by his Labour Party colleagues in government. I remind my Fine Gael friends that a gender quota was initially a Labour Party policy. The policy was embraced on a cross-party basis by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women's Rights in 2009 and was finally introduced in 2012. The policy has been effective as the number of women elected to the Dáil has increased from 13% in 2011 to 22% in 2016, but female representation is still far too low and we need to make greater strides.

The programme of events for Vótáil 100 will highlight the lack of representation by women. It will seek to increase public awareness of the need for more women to come forward, and will do so through a series of events to mark the centenary. On 1 February, Vótáil 100 hosted a conference at the Royal Irish Academy, as others have mentioned. Yesterday, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn gave a wonderful lecture as Gaeilge to mark Seachtain na Gaeilge, International Women's Week and the Centenary of Women's Suffrage. Tomorrow, a portrait of all of the current women Members of the Oireachtas by artist Noel Murphy will be officially unveiled at 2 o'clock. All women Members have been invited to attend the occasion. The painting will hang in Leinster House on public display just like the photograph of the Oireachtas women who attended the 90th anniversary in 2008.

As Members have mentioned, we will have Díospóireacht na nÓg, which is a great all-island school competition on public speaking. The 16 finalists from those schools will speak here in the Seanad Chamber on 17 April. I know many Seanad colleagues will be present for such an historic occasion.

Vótáil 100 will run an exhibition, in conjunction with the National Museum of Ireland, in Leinster House from June until September. We will conduct other events for Culture Night in September and we will participate in the Open House Dublin weekend event later in the year. We will also travel to Westminster to present the House of Commons with a portrait of Constance Markievicz to mark the fact that she was not only our first Deputy but also the first woman Member of Parliament to be elected to the House of Commons.

Let us consider the historical context for Markievicz's election, in particular the Representation of the People Act 1918. Many decades of extensive work went into the achievement of what was, in 1918, only a limited right to women's suffrage.Back in 1872, Isabella Tod established the first suffrage group in Ireland in Belfast. In 1876, the Haslams established the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association and in 1908, along with Margaret Cousins from Boyle in County Roscommon, Hanna and Francis Sheehy-Skeffingon set up the Irish Women’s Franchise League so we see a range of different women and men - there were, of course, male supporters - fighting for the cause of suffrage over many decades long before it was finally achieved in 1918. The Representation of the People Act 1918, the centenary of which we marked in February, was then succeeded by the Parliament (Qualification of Women Act) in December 1918 that allowed women to stand for the general election. We should remember that while Constance Markievicz was the only woman elected, she was not the only woman to stand for election because Winifred Carney stood in Belfast but was unsuccessful. The achievement of the vote was only one part of the campaign on which so many of these women embarked at the time. They were also very engaged in other campaigns. We think of women like Louie Bennett who was a founding member of the Irish Women Workers' Union and who campaigned for workers' rights alongside the right to suffrage and Constance Markievicz herself who campaigned for workers' and union rights as well suffrage.

Moving to contemporary resonances, there are a number of things we should be pushing forward this year to really recognise the memory and work of those women. Those campaigns include not only the campaign to increase the number of women in Parliament but campaigns around the gender pay gap bringing forward the gender pay legislation we started in this House; extension of paternity leave and child care provision in Ireland; moving to tackle online abuse, which is a real issue for many women looking to enter politics; family-friendly working hours in parliaments; and a referendum to delete the place of women in the current very limited recognition of women and mothers in the Constitution and replace it with a gender-neutral provision recognising carers alongside what I hope will be a successful campaign to repeal the eighth amendment. I agree with Senator Conway-Walsh that one significant symbolic gesture would be to name the hospital in honour of Dr. Kathleen Lynn, that remarkable woman who did so much for the cause of suffrage and the cause of women and children's rights and who really encapsulated that idea of the broader-based campaigning that marks so many of the suffrage campaigns at the time.

I will finish by saying we need to celebrate the immense contribution of women to public life in Ireland, contributions like those of Constance Markievicz, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese and so many more unsung heroes and heroines of the women's movement. There is a lovely quote from Constance Markievicz that is very famous where she exhorted young women in the lead up to the suffrage campaign not to trust to their feminine charms or the problematic chivalry of the men they might meet on the way but rather to dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave their jewels and gold wands in the bank and buy a revolver. We might - perhaps not literally - take heart from her words on the need to continue to campaign on women's rights over this important centenary year.