Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with my colleague, Senator Maria Byrne. International Women's Day, for me, is about celebrating the social, economic, cultural, sporting or political achievements of women. Today is an opportunity for us to highlight anything women do, and do well. We are all very busy for the other 364 days of the year. We do not get time to be talking about ourselves. It is about a collective journey towards gender equality. The only way we can get there is by recognising that we need to have equity as well as gender equality. For me, equity means that we need to recognise that not all women start from the same place. We need to focus on the social contract and on the solidarity we try to instill in all Government policies. We need to recognise, as Senator Flynn said earlier, that not all women start from the same place. There are some women who were so marginalised that they need so much more assistance just to get to the same level of equality of opportunity as, for argument's sake, some other women who have a choice of educational opportunities, colleges to go to and people to mingle with. There is a whole swathe of women in the middle from different walks of life. We need to recognise that equity in gender equality does not mean giving everyone the same thing. It means recognising that we do not all start from the same place.

I was lucky to sit on the Joint Committee on Gender Equality in the last number of months. The 42 recommendations that came from the citizens' assembly detail, line for line, what we need to do. We have known an awful lot of these things for an awfully long time. I am asking for people not to share my frustration but to make this realisation. I do not want my two beautiful daughters, who are young women at this stage, to go through the tripe my mother's generation would have had to go through and that I would have gone through. We need to make those 42 changes. We need to make them now and look at the timelines that we put into the report of the joint committee.

The Taoiseach's announcement this morning of a referendum was welcome. "A woman's place is in the home." I do not even know why that was grounded in our thinking 100 years ago when we wrote the Constitution. It is definitely not grounded in our thinking today. It is nowhere close to the reality of the vast majority of women's lives in this country today. The definition of family also comes nowhere near reflecting the actual reality in society today. I welcome the timelines for that referendum in November but there are 41 other things on the list that we need to get through. I want to make sure that we are all conscious of the timelines and we achieve them because I do not want to be standing here year in, year out talking about the things that have not been done. I want to be like Senator Chambers, talking about all the things we have done and have achieved.