Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for his tremendous work, not least that which is ongoing in committee. I greatly appreciate it.

I want to reflect a little on how the bias can be broken from the perspective of both policy and practice. We need to make a shift in respect of how we plan policy and practice and to ensure we see that through the lens of women's experience. In the first chapter of her book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez writes about the snow-clearing practice and policy in a town called Karlskoga in Sweden. She describes how the clearing of snow involved the main roads and arteries first, then the pedestrian routes and the cycle routes. According to the data on injuries during one snow period, women had been more greatly affected, constituting more than 70% of injuries in hospitals, and they had been, in the main, pedestrians. The author points out how the original snow-clearing schedule had not been designed to benefit men. Nobody had sat down and deliberately excluded women or not prioritised them. Rather, the men around the table had made the policy based on their own experiences. They were the ones who drove to work, so they cleared the roads first because they saw the problem through their own lens. There were more than 200 km of cycling and pedestrian routes. The very next year after they introduced the changes to the prioritisation, the number of injuries fell by 50%. That is extraordinary and it goes to show that if we just look at things through a different lens, policy and practice will change. I do not think any of our colleagues sit down with any mala fidesto be fair. I think they just do not think about it. Having women around the table, therefore, is fantastic to ensure their experiences will be included. It is a bit like the disabilities motto "Nothing About Us Without Us". We need to apply that also to women.

I welcome the changes in regard to the gender pay gap, which are important. I ask that we tack that in more widely such that, if a Department is tendering for a public contract, a weighting will be applied with regard to gender equality in that workplace.

I will spend the rest of my time paying tribute to ordinary women. Sometimes we come to the Chamber and talk about high-profile heroes, but in our everyday lives, there are ordinary women who are incredible heroes too. I refer to women such as family carers, that is, the mothers, sisters and daughters who live sacrificial lives, including as the carers of children with disabilities. I spend much of my days listening to them and advocating on their behalf. They are extraordinary advocates, but they are unable to advocate for their children as much as they might like. They feel the inadequacy of that when they should not. It is not their fault and they are not to blame. For both family carers and families who live with someone with disabilities, whatever we are doing, and I accept we are doing a lot, we need to do more. I am thinking of people, one of whom contacted me in the past 24 hours, who live with the effects of thalidomide. They have lived their 60-odd years with extraordinary disabilities that were not of anybody's choosing. I think of their mothers and how that experience, of taking medication they should never have been given, was for them.

I am thinking also of mothers who live in homes where there is domestic violence, who may not yet have made the phone call, perhaps because they are calculating the cost and suffering the abuse until they have everything lined up. They think about their children and the needs of their children, and about the social prejudice they may suffer when they tell their story and go to a refuge, if such a place is available to them. They think about how, if they make all those decisions, people around them who will say, "I told you so. I knew. Why did you not do something earlier?" They think about the people who will condemn and shame them rather than envelope them with gratitude for their courage.

I am also thinking about the mothers in Ukraine, some of whom have been making journeys. Over recent weeks, I have heard about the extraordinary things they have had to do, the decisions they have to make and the sadness of trying to maintain normality in their children's lives amid the horrific butchery and murder that is going on in Ukraine. In that regard, I pay tribute to H.E. Ms Larysa Gerasko. I am sure that when she was appointed as ambassador and presented her credentials, she did not envisage this. We all think of ambassadors’ jobs as like something from a Ferrero Rocher advertisement, and we imagine how exciting the job must be and how grand and lovely it must be, yet here is a woman who has been an extraordinary leader in this moment. I have had a number of meetings with her. She is kind and compassionate but steely strong, and she represents her people with extraordinary nobility. I am proud to have met and encountered her. Nevertheless, she is a sister, a daughter and an aunt. She is greatly affected by what is going on in her country and feels the heartbreak of knowing and hearing from her friends and of receiving videos showing what is going on. She has been extraordinary. The ordinariness of her pain as a daughter, sister and aunt contrasts with her extraordinariness as a leader at this time leading our responses as people. She is marvellous and is to be commended. Today I think of all the ordinary women who are heroes, extraordinary in their everyday lives.