Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I support amendment No. 28, which concerns the commission making recommendations about gender quotas at local elections. This has arisen at the Committee on Gender Equality, of which Senator Higgins is also a member. We spoke to officials and there is concern about how we might implement that. Quotas are applied in the Dáil around political party funding, but there must be a way, if we use our collective experience, to come up with a solution to implement quotas for local elections. The European Parliament has historically been much better in this regard. The Dáil is probably only now where that parliament was in the 1990s. I support amendment No. 28 and quotas for local elections, all the time recognising the accompanying policy implementation that has to happen around encouraging gender balance in politics.