EU membership for Eastern European countries should be conditional on respect for human rights, including women's rights, the chairperson of the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights has told the ICA.
Ms Nel van Dijk was guest speaker at the ICA's annual general meeting in Athlone, Co Westmeath, where she was introduced as the woman who had "tackled" the Irish EU Commissioner, Mr Padraig Flynn.
She said that she expected the women's committee to recommend to the Commission measures to give self employed women, and the wives of self employed men, the same rights to social insurance as employed women. This was particularly important for rural women.
"Things like sickness benefit and maternity leave should be available to these women through general insurance, not personal insurance", she said. The committee is to discuss these matters on May 29th, after which recommendations will be made to the Commission.
Referring to the situation of women in Eastern Europe, she said that traffickers in women had easily turned their attention from Asia and Latin America to Europe.
She said that the Commissioner responsible for Europol, Ms Anita Gradin, was sympathetic to dealing with the problem of trafficking in women and a conference on the implications of this was being organised.
The European organisation for police co operation, Europol, was concentrating on tracking down stolen cars in Europe. "If it were up to me", she said, "this priority would be quickly replaced by the breaking up of the networks of traffickers in women."
Asked by Mrs Kitty Shannon, from Boyle, Co Roscommon, what was being done about prostitutes in Amsterdam, she replied that 80 per cent of these women were illegal immigrants. Sending them out of the country would not solve the problem, but drive it underground.
Ms van Dijk said that the coercion of the Communist era in Eastern Europe had convinced many women there that "our outdated breadwinner principle" was the best model. "Women aspire to the comfortable existence of the house wife, entirely devoted to hubby and the kids. How are we going to bridge the gap between the ambitions of Western European women and those of their Eastern European counterparts?" she asked.
Ms van Dijk emphasised that rural women worked long hours for relatively low incomes. They rarely had a clear legal position, such as a legal business partnership with their husbands. "The position of women in the countryside deserves more attention than it usually receives", she said.