Misconception that Fine Gael is a conservative party, says Varadkar

There is a misconception that Fine Gael is a conservative party when it has in fact played a “crucial role” in advancing equality and in particular gender equality, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said.

Noting that women have often been written out of Irish history, Mr Varadkar said there is also a tendency to write Fine Gael out of history when it comes to achieving social progress.

Speaking at the launch of a book on former Fine Gael female politicians, the party leader said he believes the party is often wrongly perceived as a conservative party.

“We are not. We are very much a party that is a centre party, perhaps a centre-right party, but a centre party nonetheless. One that is, at least for the last few decades, economically and socially liberal,” he said.

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Mr Varadkar said the conservative label has been pinned on Fine Gael partly due to “our friends on the left who don’t like us”. He said some on the left are “embarrassed” that the Fine Gael party has brought about such social progress “sometimes with them, but often without them”.

Socially-conservative State

This has not always been the case, he acknowledged, noting that the party founded a very socially-conservative State.

“We were in power for a period in which there were Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes and very strict laws that banished women from society and the workplace and from positions they should have had. I think we should acknowledge that,” he said.

He said his party was “complicit” in restricting the role of women in society for at least the first five decades of Irish independence. However, it should not be forgotten, he said, that it was the Fine Gael party that abolished legitimacy and twice tried (once successfully) to remove the constitutional ban on divorce, brought about marriage equality, and repealed the Eighth Amendment.

There is more to do to achieve gender equality, Mr Varadkar went on. Going forward the party will respond to the Citizens Assembly on Gender Equality, work to ensure everyone has access to a pension, and continue to work on fixing the gender pay gap.

“Why is the garda paid more than the nurse? No reason really… It’s just that one was traditionally a man’s role and one was traditionally a woman’s role. Those things have to change, and it shouldn’t take a generation to change these things,” he said.

Minister Helen McEntee highlighted some of the stories of former female colleagues who she said fought in “very difficult circumstances for social progression”.

“So much of the social progress we have made in more recent years, really the foundations were made long before many of the parties of the left who claim to have made these changes. They were our colleagues and our former colleagues who made these changes or laid the foundations in very adversarial and difficult times,” she said.

Ms McEntee said International Women’s Day provides a great opportunity to identify and address the issues facing women. As Minister for Justice she said one of her chief aims is to better tackle gender and domestic violence.

Francis Fitzgerald MEP said she is disappointed to hear so many young women are turning away from social media and politics due to the level of online abuse.

She said populism and disinformation are a “big problem” affecting the political system and they must be dealt with strongly.

Ms Fitzgerald said it is “intolerable” that there are so few women elected to the Dáil, which “doesn’t match where we are in a society” Progress in achieving better female representation has been “far too slow”, she said, adding: “It is just not acceptable. But I think change is on the way and we have got to grasp that as a party.”