In less than a month, representatives of the Government and NGOs will attend an important UN conference on women in New York. This conference will provide governments with an opportunity to review their activities in implementing the commitments to which they signed up during the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Ireland's record on progressing the Beijing declaration and platform for action has been poor. We signed up to 12 clear promises in Beijing, but all the evidence suggests that we have made little headway on progressing them.
In January the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform produced a national report on the implementation of the Beijing platform for action. While the report presents a range of measures which are ongoing since the Beijing conference, many of them are not new and others are merely pilot programmes. Ultimately, the report is an attempt to put a good face on the failure of the Government to make progress on the Beijing promises. Since then, the role and status of Irish women has, in some instances, disimproved.
One of the other crucial promises to which the Government signed up was the alleviation of poverty among women. It also promised to promote greater economic independence. Since taking office, there has been almost no movement on some of the most crucial income inequalities which still face women. In the last budget, the Government decided to introduce controversial individualisation of the tax code. In doing so, it decided that the poorest women in society, who are treated as dependants in the social welfare code, could wait for their right to an individual payment.
Women living in poverty are often the managers of poverty in their households. They take responsibility for stretching an inadequate budget to meet the needs of children and of running the household, often by sacrificing their own needs. This role which women play in disadvantaged households is not reflected in the social welfare code. Women are still not treated as individual adults. In the context of our commitments made in Beijing, this must change.
In addition, since the Beijing conference, it has emerged through research carried out by the Combat Poverty Agency that many older women are seriously at risk from living in poverty. Again, this arises because of their treatment in the social welfare code. When it comes to the administration of pensions, this results in them getting a reduced payment either through the qualified adult rate or a non-contributory pension. As a result of the marriage bar, women were forced to leave their jobs until the 1970s. Many of these women are now reaching pension age and discovering that, because they did accumulate sufficient stamps during their working lives, they do not qualify for a contributory pension. To date, these women are still paying for the blatant inequalities which were accepted in society until recent decades.
The Beijing promises contain other important commitments which are being pushed to the bottom of the priority list. The Beijing promises seek the elimination of the violation of the rights of the girl child. The current lack of appropriate treatment places for girls with behavioural problems flies in the face of this promise. There have been many cases in the courts recently in relation to that issue. The growing number of young girls who, because of a lack of structures in society to deal with their needs, are sleeping on the streets at night also flies in the face of the promise.
By signing up to the Beijing platform for action, we signed up to a commitment to advance women at the heart of all Government policy. However, when the Government took office almost three years ago, its first act to undermine women was the merger of the Department of Equality and Law Reform with the Department of Justice. The post of second secretary in that Department remains vacant, underlining the virtual consumption of the Department of Equality and Law Reform by the Department of Justice.
From there on, equality became virtually a non-issue for the Government. During its first year in office, it managed to reduce the number of women representatives on State boards instead of increasing it. Now women's representation on such bodies has significantly fallen to the extent that even women chairpersons of some boards have been replaced by men.
We have progressed little since Beijing. An honest audit of our efforts on the Beijing promises at the New York conference will show that we have yet to really begin the work of executing our commitments to which we signed up five years ago in Beijing. A debate in the House before the New York conference would be useful to consider the various issues and promises which were made in Beijing. It is crucial to produce an action plan on the Beijing promises and make a real difference to the status, role and position of women in Irish society.
