Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Just to follow a brilliant speech from Senator Hoey, I always say it is not about getting to the table, it is about shaping the agenda and changing what is being discussed at the table. However, I think Senator Hoey’s smash-up-the-table-altogether-and-repurpose-it is taking it perhaps the necessary step forward. I think the Minister is hearing that it is about power when we talk about it. It was from women who did not have power but who formed a union and insisted on taking power that International Women’s Day came. It is about challenging it. There was a great moment at one of the big UN events where different countries were speaking about the things they were doing for women with the various organisations. I think it was the Costa Rican representative who stood up and instead of beginning with the three or four things Costa Rica did for women, they said what they did to address the patriarchy problem and the problem of a huge systemic imbalance in power. That is what it is. It is not about dealing solely with the symptoms; it is about dealing with the core problem of power inequality. That is where we are at. It is a transformation.

We are seeing that the world can totally change in response to Covid. We are seeing the world change in terms of Covid. Women are tired of seeing small, incremental slight improvements while keeping business as usual, effectively trucking along. That is why I am also on Committee on Gender Equality that Senator Warfield spoke about. That has a very strong mandate from citizens. I say this directly to the Minister in his Department to be clear, as it is very important. There need to be referendums next year.Our committee is not just minding the issue and keeping it off the table for the next nine months. We expect the Government to produce a referendum next year to deliver crucial changes. I will speak to two of them, the first of which is the gender-neutral recognition of care, not only by removing the clause about women being in the home, which is important, but also through a recognition of the State's responsibility to support care. Care cannot just be the invisible structure that keeps everything going. During Covid, we have seen how much everything relies on it. The Minister is starting from a low base and knows that more needs to be done in the context of working conditions for childcare providers. We probably need a public childcare system. That is what the Citizens' Assembly looked for.

Other care work is systematically undervalued and carers are not cared for. In this respect, there is a significant issue with student nurses. According to today's edition of The Irish Times, applications to the Central Applications Office, CAO, for nursing courses are down 27%. This is because nursing is undervalued and under-respected. The Minister will be aware that, globally, 2.6 million nurses wrote to the UN to point out the human rights violation against them as front-line health workers because the EU blocked the sharing of Covid-19 vaccine information. Those 2.6 million nurses have sent us a message, which is one to remember as I look at the painting in this Chamber of Elizabeth O'Farrell, who was a nurse who contributed. Irish student nurses are voting with their feet. The message is that we need to focus on care.

All families must be recognised. It is not a coincidence that 53% of homeless families in Ireland are headed by a lone parent, usually a woman. The highest levels of deprivation in the State are seen among lone-parent families, which are usually headed by women. Let us make it a goal for the Government and all of us this year to ensure that, by next year, we will have addressed the fact that women who have children are still effectively being penalised by the State. As the Minister will be aware, they were systematically penalised in the past in terms of mother and baby homes, and they still are.

The Government also needs to listen to women on issues like the National Maternity Hospital. It is not enough to say we will try to treat you a bit better or ask those in a voluntary trust linked to a religious group to treat you a little better. The people are saying that we want to own our maternity hospital. We want public healthcare. The women who are citizens of the State - they represent the majority of citizens - want a national maternity hospital that is theirs, not simply because they have been treated badly and want to be treated better, but because they want the power relocated to them, that is, to women. That is where it needs to be. This emerged in the opinion of the Citizens' Assembly's because those involved understood it was not just a wish list. It said that the right to collective bargaining was a gender equality issue in order that women could use their collective strength in unions. It pointed to gender budgeting. We need to remember that women's voices need to be heard when we decide how money is allocated.

Lastly, I come to the question of conflict. We have spoken about Ukraine, but we also need to remember the women starving in Yemen and Afghanistan and the women who fought for a civil government in Sudan and did not get the support they needed. At a time like this, women's voices and power are crucial. Under UN Resolution 1325, women must be at the table in any negotiation on the end of conflicts and the building of peace. Their voices must also be heard when rebuilding peace. It is not okay that their voices are pushed to the margins, including voices of peace. Those voices are crucial. Female human rights defenders, including environmental human rights defenders like Berta Cáceres who lost their lives on that other front line, namely, the battle against climate change, must not be pushed to one side and told that, yet again, we need to wait because we are focusing our energies on business as usual and following the same playbooks we have used before in terms of militarism.