PROMISED GENDER quota legislation will be published during this Dáil session because the low number of women TDs means parliament is not “a fair reflection of 21st century Ireland”, Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has said.
The Labour leader said three of the most senior legal officeholders in the State were women – the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Chief Justice – and claimed his party had “done better than most” when it came to electing women deputies.
“Do I think it’s enough? Of course not. We still have a lot of work to do to achieve a better gender balance in public life,” he said.
Mr Gilmore said the Electoral Amendment Political Funding Bill would “be published this Dáil session”. Under the proposed legislation, political parties will have to implement a 30 per cent gender quota for general election candidates, or else face severe financial penalties.
State funding for parties will be cut by half unless at least 30 per cent of the candidates they put forward are women, and this will rise to 40 per cent after seven years.
“The aim of this legislation is not to penalise political parties, but to incentivise them to actively encourage women to stand for election,” Mr Gilmore said.
“Given that less than 14 per cent of the members of the 31st Dáil are women – and that half of constituencies have no women TDs at all – no one would argue that our parliament is a fair reflection of 21st century Ireland,” Mr Gilmore said.
He said all of Labour’s recommendations for the Taoiseach’s nominations to the Seanad were women, “and deliberately so”. Mr Gilmore recommended four of the 11 nominated members to the 60-seat Upper House.
They were academic and rights campaigner Katherine Zappone; general election candidates Lorraine Higgins from Galway East and Mary Moran from Louth, and Aideen Hayden, the chairwoman of Threshold.
The current Dáil has 25 women TDs, eight of whom represent the Labour Party.
Labour deputy Joanna Tuffy is an outspoken critic of gender quotas and recently boycotted a cross-party meeting of women TDs and Senators being facilitated by Fine Gael’s Mary Mitchell-O’Connor on the grounds that men were not invited.
Mr Gilmore warned that the number of women in the Dáil would not rise “unless we increase their representation at local level”. He said the local elections in 2014 would be a “critical milestone”.
He was speaking to the Labour Women’s conference on Saturday.
“And let’s be clear: one of the most important lessons of the general, local and European elections of the past two years is that the quality of the candidate is very important.
“It is not enough simply to field more women candidates: we have to field candidates who can win,” he said.
“In short, good candidates are made, not born . . . We all want to see more women in public life, but that means putting our time, our efforts and our money where our mouth is.”
