Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am very happy to salute my women colleagues on this 100th anniversary of voting rights for women. I am equally happy, and it is very significant in the context, to welcome my good friend the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Madigan, to the House. I congratulate her on her appointment and how proactive and effective she has been since then.

The fundamental thing that merits saying at the outset is that all interpersonal relationships should be based on mutual respect and equality. If that is the case, they are mutually enhancing relationships. Whether they are relationships between the sexes or relationships in any context, it is mutually enhancing where there is respect and equality. There have been many achievements for women down the years and we should salute and recognise the agencies involved in those achievements.

The European Union has been a reforming force for women. It has brought in legislative imperatives to the domestic Legislature that have greatly enhanced the role of women. We should salute the EU in that context, recognise it and feel especial loyalty to it, particularly in the Brexit context for that very reason. The Irish Judiciary - and the Minister, Senator Bacik and Senator Noone will be conscious of this, among others - has been a reforming force for Irish women. In its rulings down through the years it has advanced the cause of women and led the Oireachtas and society in this sphere. We should recognise the Judiciary, another arm of government, for that. The trade union movement, as was cited earlier, has also been a wonderful force for equality.

As a rural representative, I would like to salute a body that has not been mentioned today but had an extraordinarily significant effect in this area. I remember this from my childhood. I refer to the influence of the Irish Countrywomen's Association, ICA, on the liberation, self-enhancement, personal development and empowerment of country women in isolated locations, and otherwise, right across this country. The role of the ICA can not be underestimated. We should salute its leadership and its members down the years.

I am proud to be a member of the Council of Europe. I am on that body with very distinguished members of this House, including my great friend Senator Maura Hopkins, Senator Colette Kelleher, Senator Rónán Mullen and Senator Paul Gavan, who is soon to be a member. Senator Higgins played an extraordinary proactive leadership role in the Council of Europe previously. It is a major agent for equality and gender equality specifically.

I am proud to be a member of a party that brought in gender quotas and tried to break the glass ceiling. That has clearly been effective. It will be incremental because in the future the numbers will go up. Today, it is not right that any speaker should sit down without recognising the dark sphere of our relationships in the past. That is the mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries. They represent a dark chapter that cannot be avoided in our discourse. In any kind of a redemptive or restorative process we can not ignore them.

The way to salute them is to respect and actively support single mothers, women in difficult pregnancies and women in dysfunctional families. If we support those women now who are vulnerable, on the edge and on the periphery, we honour and, in some way, redeem ourselves from what happened in that dark chapter with the Magdalen laundries. We are true to the values we should extol.

It is true and a point well made by Senator McFadden that apart from the efficacy of women's equal participation and women's rights, mutual regard of women in society, and indeed parity of relationships, also has benefits for our economy, the well-being of society, for social order, good governance, and for a peaceful, proactive and successful society. I gather my time is up