Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

That is not a problem. I thank the Acting Chair and the Members for their contributions and for reflecting the progress that has been made, the challenges that remain and the frustration about those challenges. I recognise there is frustration regarding the slow pace of reform in certain areas. I share that same level of frustration too.

I had the privilege to represent Ireland at the UN Commission on the Status of Women over the past two days in New York. The key theme of this year’s conference was technology-facilitated gender-based violence and recognising the huge world that has been opened to everyone by the online space, particularly to women, and minority and vulnerable women. The online space opens everybody to a whole new range of avenues of attack. It opens female politicians and female leaders to that avenue of attack as well. We talked about those in the context of the developing world. Ireland hosted a good side meeting where an MP from Tanzania spoke about the sustained, personalised and sexualised attacks that she had faced. A colleague from the Belgian Government, the state secretary Sarah Schlitz, spoke about similar experiences she has encountered as well. I am sure every Senator and every female Senator in this House can speak to the comments, from derogatory to deeply vicious and deeply violent comments they have no doubt received on social media.

We are all are in politics and have to be ready to receive robust criticism. However, what female politicians are encountering these days goes far beyond the bounds of any sort of acceptability. At a time when we are one year and about three months from the local elections, no doubt all of us are looking to encourage people to sign up locally to run as candidates or supporting candidates we have already identified in their first steps. That is such an issue that people raise. We hear, for example, “I am not willing to see all these things said about me” or “I feel I need to go on Twitter to be part of politics but I do not want to get that constant barrage incoming.” I will not go into all of the legislative points raised but it is a major issue as a society. It is not just Ireland, but as a society, the quality of online debate is something we have to talk about. We are losing too many good people from politics and from other areas of life as well.

At the Commission on the Status of Women, I had the privilege to meet the Women’s Forum on Afghanistan yesterday for a lunch hosted by the Irish Consulate. The Irish Consulate has been highly supportive. During on our time on the Security Council, we were intensively supportive of Afghanistan. In particular, we fought to maintain sanctions against Taliban regime leaders when there was an effort to perhaps let those sanctions fall away. Ireland led and the Afghan women’s forum recognised that. To hear the manner in which women are being erased from public life in Afghanistan – no education, no facility to work, no facility to work with NGOs – is alarming. In the context of LGBT+ rights, I have spoken about the fear there must be to live in your country and see your rights being eroded away. Women in Afghanistan and Iran are seeing that. We are seeing that now in international protection applications from both of those countries. They are rising quite considerably as people flee them because of the threats, violence and the diminishment of their personhood that we are seeing in those countries.

It was interesting because you are exposed to what Ireland is doing on an international scene. I met the equality minister for Sierra Leone. I actually met her last year at the Commission on the Status of Women as well. Last year, she was talking about legislation she was bringing forward to mandate gender quotas in the Sierra Leone Parliament. She talked about how it was going to be a big fight. She got it passed in January, so that will apply for their next general election. She spoke about the support from the Irish Embassy. We are one of the few countries that is represented at embassy level in Sierra Leone. She said the ambassador was absolutely essential in helping with additional pressure to get that legislation passed. Her next big campaign now is outlawing female genital mutilation, FGM.That is an issue of fundamental importance to the most basic rights of women and girls.

I hosted an event where the Irish representative at the UN had again provided seed funding to Jordan and Palestine to undertake research on the cost of domestic violence in both those countries. We maybe sometimes miss out on the great the work that is being done by Ireland and that is being led by our Department of Foreign Affairs on a very individualised basis. It can often be a small amount of money, or it can be those individual engagements that promote equality in many forms, but particularly gender equality across the world. I wanted to take the opportunity to put it on the record of the House my real admiration for the work that is being done, as well as the real recognition of the work that Ireland does, whether it is done by the Government or NGOs.

I was very pleased to be able to join the Taoiseach and the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, today in the context of announcing a timeline for referenda. We are hoping it will be in November. That is the plan, and we just need to solidify a clear date. However, there is a timeline for an interdepartmental group to hopefully bring forward wording in May, to get that agreed on by June and then that will run into a referendum process. The removal of the wording on women's place in the home is symbolic, absolutely. However, there are other things that group is talking about that are not symbolic, such as the definition of the family and whether we broaden it beyond the marital family. That is really important. For me, when I was campaigning on marriage equality, my fundamental argument was that my relationship, if I got married, would never be recognised under the Constitution. As a lawyer, that is important to me. While that is something I can access now, there are plenty of incredibly solid families where people are unmarried. They may be headed by lone parents, by grandparents or by other people. We need to really consider that broadening of the definition, as well as looking at issues of discrimination and looking at having our Constitution as having an explicitly non-discriminatory element to it. I think that is something well worth considering.

By working on building on the fantastic work that has been done by the Oireachtas committee and particularly by the citizens' assembly, I hope we will be able to bring a wording together that can get broad, cross-party and non-party support, as well as support across the wider civil society. We know these referenda are not a slam dunk. We know that from the children's rights referendum. We therefore need to work closely over the next couple of months and I look forward to my Department playing a key role in that. I thank the Acting Chair and I wish everybody a happy International Women's Day.