Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of equality and what it means. A report in The Irish Timestoday quotes the Balance for Better Business survey, a Government supported survey. It notes that of all the executive director appointments in the last 18 months in the Republic of Ireland, not one woman was appointed during that time.There was a target of having at least one woman in senior management in all publicly quoted companies in Ireland by the end of 2020 and we will fall far short of that. In fact, almost two in every five publicly quoted companies here are all male in their senior management. That is not even their boards; that is just their senior management. That is a disgrace. When I was a child I remember Noelle Campbell-Sharpe attempting every year to get on the board of the bank and the great discussion that caused at the time. I did not appreciate then what that meant but it is appalling that, a couple of decades later, we are in a situation where women are still trying to breach that ceiling. That is a disgrace.

An experience I had in recent weeks was of a couple of women coming to me who have made claims for the likes of optical benefit or whatever using their new, exciting PPS number that was issued to them under the great leadership of the then Minister, now the Leader, Senator Regina Doherty, in that Department, only to find that as a qualified adult, the benefits they had under their husband's PPS number have not transferred to their new PPS number. They were refused under their own PPS number and had to put up their husband's number, which seems a peculiar anomaly. I am sure there was not an intention to do that but it smacks of inequality. We need an urgent debate in the House on equality and what that means for 2021.