Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have enjoyed the past half an hour, listening to everyone's statements and the stories that have been told. There has been a richness to the stories about our families and the strong women in our lives, including our mums and grandmothers. It hits me that we are very fortunate. All of those women lived through hard times such as the war-torn years in the 1940s, and we know the infant mortality rates in that time. They lived through times of recession and emigration. I sometimes wonder how we are here today at all, when I hear the stories. My mum always paid tribute to a woman in our village, Mrs. Hall, the midwife, who came around and delivered the babies safely. I remember thinking that if it were not for women like her in villages and towns all around Ireland, I do not know what would have happened.

We have talked about many things today. International Women's Day is about equality for women. I heard Senator Chambers state that only 24% of councillors are women. What we are going to do about that? We have had positive quotas for general elections but we also need to have those quotas at local election level. I was a councillor. It has been a whirlwind for me; I do not know how I am here, sitting in this House. It has only been two years since I got involved in a community action group. I was then elected in the 2019 local elections and now have the wonderful opportunity of being here, representing the place from which I come. Sometimes being a representative of one's local area is about speaking for that area and the men, women and children who live there. We must bring people forward and encourage women to run for office. We have such strong women. I was involved in a recent campaign for a cycle way and dealt with different towns and villages about different routes. The women who got involved were amazing. They were all managing development groups or Tidy Towns groups. They were the organisers. Why are we not seeing more of those women coming through in local elections? Why are they not the ones who we are bringing forward? That would be positive and we need something like quotas for local elections.

I will speak to some of the points that the Minister made in his speech. I am a spokesperson for further and higher education. I spoke earlier about the fact that women comprise only 26% of professorship roles. I understand that it is about equality at every level but I believe that unless women are at the decision-making table, we are not going to change what it is like for women in the rest of society. It is not going to happen. We need to see women on television, speaking as experts, and professors in all areas. We need more women as experts, leaders and CEOs in all our organisations. At the moment, only 12% of our organisations have a female CEO. We need more women acting as chairpersons and appointees of boards. It is not enough to sit back and say that it will happen because it will not. It has not happened in the past ten, 20, 30 or 40 years. When I thought about equality when I was in college, I thought I had the same rights as everybody else. Did I? Do I? When I say that, I am talking a little about recruitment because when it comes to recruiting for positions in education, businesses, workplaces or the Oireachtas, who is doing the recruiting?We need to make sure that our assessment and recruitment panels are balanced. We need to make sure that what we are being judged for in the qualifications for the role is balanced and that when advertisements for different roles and positions are placed, they take into account qualities and criteria that favour both men and women. They should be gender-balanced criteria. Recruitment is a key issue for me because unless we have fair recruitment practices, balance will not happen. I am a strong believer that unconscious bias is a problem and that we need to have something to tackle it. It has been proven through Nobel Prize winners and yet unconscious bias training is somehow seen as not being effective and that we should do away with it without having anything in its place. We need to have unconscious bias training and we need people to acknowledge that there is unconscious bias that we do not realise. That has to be part of this.

Some people mentioned our public representatives. It is important that we have representation of men and women in this House from many different backgrounds. Councillor Yemi Adenuga has been mentioned. She is one of our councillors of colour and she will be launching Proud to Serve, with stories of 28 women who have been in this House. I know Mary O'Rourke who lives near me in Athlone. Mary Harney is originally from Ahascragh in east Galway. There is a hotbed of activity by political and public representatives in that area. I will ask the Minister, in his role relating to children and families, to address family resource centres and how, with Covid, we will support children in areas covered by DEIS and Pobal. Women are feeling the impact of Covid-19, especially single parents. I will be asking the Minister about how we provide family resource centres for some of these areas and would appreciate his support for that.