Joint Committee on Gender Equality debate

Recommendations of the Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality: Discussion (Resumed)

Chairman

I welcome the witnesses, both those physically present and online. Members have the option of being physically present in the committee room or joining the meeting via Microsoft Teams from their Leinster House offices, but they may not participate from outside the parliamentary precincts. I ask members joining on Teams to mute their microphones when not making a contribution and to use the raise-hand function to indicate. All those present in the committee room are asked to exercise personal responsibility to protect themselves from the risk of contracting Covid-19.

Today we are considering the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality regarding leadership in politics, public life and the workplace. We are delighted to have representatives from Women for Election and See Her Elected, as well as Dr. Fiona Buckley from University College Cork, joining us today. I welcome the following: Dr. Buckley, lecturer in the department of government and politics in UCC; Ms Caitríona Gleeson, CEO of Women For Election; and Ms Megan Reilly, training and engagement lead with Women For Election. I also welcome those joining us on Teams, Ms Tara Farrell, CEO of Longford Women’s Link, and Dr. Michelle Maher, manager of the See Her Elected programme. They are all very welcome.

Before we begin, I must read an important notice regarding parliamentary privilege. Witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the evidence they give to the committee. However, if they are directed by the committee to cease giving evidence on a particular matter and they continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity in such a way as to make them identifiable. Participants who are giving evidence from a location outside parliamentary precincts are asked to note that the constitutional protections afforded to those participating from with parliamentary precincts do not extend to them. No clear guidance can be given on whether, or the extent to which, the participation is covered by absolute privilege of a statutory nature.

I will invite witnesses to make their opening statements before opening the floor to members for questions and answers. I ask Ms Gleeson to make her statement on behalf of Women for Election.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Women for Election is working to solve the high levels of gender inequality in Irish politics. Since our foundation in 2012 as a national and non-partisan organisation, we have been providing direct supports, training and interventions to inspire, equip and support a diversity of women from communities across Ireland to enter and succeed in politics. We strongly advocate for systemic changes to make politics more accessible, inclusive and safer for women, along with driving dynamic collaborations to help achieve our vision of full and equal representation of a diversity of women in Irish politics. We are driven by an ambition to help Ireland realise 50:50 representation by 2030. To this end, we want to see 1,000 women supported to run for local election in 2024 and 250 women running in the next general election.

Equality for women in Ireland is a critical driver of social and economic development. The achievement of full and equal representation of a diversity of women in public life is key to achieving and realising gender equality in Ireland. Not only do the continued low levels of women in public life result in a weaker democracy, but the absence of women from the centres of power and decision-making in public life can reinforce harmful norms and behaviours in wider society, which can manifest in some of the worst forms of discrimination and abuse of women.

As we will hear in more detail from Dr. Buckley shortly, the data paint a stark picture. Ireland is ranked 100th in the world for the percentage of women in Parliament, with men occupying 77% of Dáil seats and 74% of local council seats. In 2022, only four women represent the whole province of Munster in the Dáil. There are 11 constituencies and 23 local electoral areas with no women elected to represent them. A Traveller woman has never been elected locally or nationally. We are still waiting for our first female Taoiseach and the first female Minister for Finance, to name a few positions. Despite our pioneering start for gender equality in politics when Countess Markievicz was elected as Europe's first female minister, we have floundered and lagged when it comes to equal and fair representation since that first Dáil. Considering we have had 100 years of women in political life in Ireland, it is fair to say that our political institutions and systems have deliberately worked against women becoming active citizens in our own country. The absence of a critical mass of women from the Dáil and the majority of local councils hurts everyone. The lack of diversity in decision-making is severely limiting the potential for effective governance and a healthy democracy. This status quo is also damaging Ireland’s international reputation as a progressive country.

If we are serious about tackling gender inequality in Ireland, we have to radically address a key driver, that is, the distribution of power in politics. Put clearly, radical and practical solutions to accelerate to 50:50 representation are imminently needed. A priority focus must be the extension of 40% gender quotas, with nested ethnic quotas to take effect for the 2024 local elections. The solutions need to include non-compliance penalties and an initial package of financial incentives for political parties that meet the 40% minimum target.

We welcome and encourage the fully resourced implementation of proposed legislation on hate crime, online abuse and other measures aimed at increasing security and tackling the high prevalence of targeted abuse, particularly towards women in public life.

Explicit maternity and paternity leave provisions in the Oireachtas and local government are already 100 years past their due date. We welcome the recent introduction by the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, of the general scheme of a Bill to introduce maternity protection and other measures for local authority elected members. However, we encourage a greater urgency to pass and implement this Bill as there are sitting councillors who are currently negatively impacted by the absence of maternity leave provision.

We understand the constitutional changes needed to allow for a modern Oireachtas. We strongly advocate that such a referendum is packaged with other proposed referendums that this committee is considering. We welcome in particular Deputy MacNeill's Bill on the thirty-ninth amendment of the Constitution to facilitate remote parliamentary voting. We believe it is critical that the Oireachtas is modernised and enables modern and hybrid vote working for Deputies and Senators, in particular to attract women from rural areas and politicians who have caring responsibilities.

We also welcome the Ceann Comhairle's commitment to the full implementation of the Oireachtas forum on a family-friendly and inclusive Parliament. We recently worked with the National Women's Council of Ireland, NWCI, to advise the development of a family-friendly toolkit for local government and we strongly urge local councils to apply this resource and further develop a suite of measures to make local politics more inclusive and family-friendly.

We welcome the assembly's recognition of the positive impact of the programmes Women for Election has been delivering for the last decade. However, to truly maximise our impact and the impact of other groups we need to see both a significant scaling up of resources and the introduction of a coherent national government strategy, with clear targets, actions and resources to ensure that Ireland rapidly accelerates to 50:50 by 2030.

The prevalence of last minute ticket additions or unsupported female candidates needs a more radical approach. Fundamentally, political parties need to select and support women and men equally in the next elections. While very necessary, quotas should be the minimum target and 50:50 should be the established standard. This requires a radical shift. There is no shortage of practical and systemic solutions, including those I have outlined above. What is needed now is the political will from across the leadership of all political parties to implement them.

We strongly advocate for the full and imminent implementation of the assembly's recommendations Nos. 20, 23 and 24 and we commend the assembly members and this committee on the careful consideration of these solutions. If we are serious about tackling one of the main roots of gender inequality in Ireland, the need and time for a comprehensive, radical solution towards 50:50 is now.

Chairman

I thank Ms Gleeson for that succinct and clear outline. It was much appreciated. I invite Ms Farrell and Ms Maher to make their opening statement on behalf of See Her Elected.

Ms Tara Farrell

I thank the committee for the invitation to speak to it today. I am CEO of Longford Women’s Link. Longford Women’s Link is a social enterprise founded in 1995 and we provide services to more than 1,000 women and children annually as part of our unique model of integrated service delivery. We engage in widespread regional and national advocacy and I am the current chair of Irish Rural Link.

We have been active in the area of women in local democracy for more than a decade, commencing with our women’s manifesto programme in 2009 which was supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. We have been working with a variety of organisations to support increased participation of women in rural communities over the last number of years. With 50:50 North West we have long been collaborators on the issue of supporting women into public life. Following a joint conference in 2015 both organisations committed to finding workable solutions to tackle this issue. The See Her Elected, SHE, programme was officially launched in 2019 and supported by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We believe the participation of women in rural constituencies in political and public life is essential in building inclusive and resilient communities.

Dr. Michelle Maher

I manage the SHE programme for Longford Women’s Link. I thank the committee for allowing us to participate remotely today. In doing so, the committee recognises that innovation is required to facilitate women in rural Ireland to contribute to politics.

The 2019 local election results made stark reading for women in rural Ireland. Overall, 24% of county councillors elected were women. This figure is, of course, skewed by the high number of women elected to councils in Dublin and surrounding counties, where at least 30% of those elected were women. This picture changes dramatically the further from Dublin you go. Of the 37 county councillors in Donegal, just four are women. In 2019, three women and 15 men were elected to each of Leitrim, Sligo and Roscommon County Councils. In Longford just one woman was elected in 2019.

For ourselves, the arrival of Covid meant moving SHE fully online, meaning women beyond our originally envisaged north-west and midlands region could participate. We are now nationwide with women from all over Ireland joining us. We are joined by women from Mayo, where just two of the 30 county councillors are women, from Monaghan, where there two women in a council of 18 members, and from Kerry, where four out of 33 councillors are women.

SHE supports the citizens’ assembly’s recommendation to extend gender quotas for party candidates at general elections to local elections. As the purpose of SHE is to support women into local politics in rural Ireland, we will limit our contribution today to our area of expertise of local elections and rural Ireland.

Our support for this recommendation is because it complements two areas of our work in rural Ireland, namely, SHESchool and the Women’s Regional Caucus. We do not support quotas only as a method of strengthening a pipeline from local to national politics, although we recognise that many national politicians start their political careers in county councils. We believe that making the pipeline a focus depreciates the valuable work of local government.

The first of our reasons for supporting quotas comes from our free online SHESchool, providing political and election education to women. See Her Elected has written Ireland’s first guidebook to running in the local elections, which is available for free in English and Polish. The guidebook is supported by free online practical workshops. The innovative success of SHE and SHESchool has been recognised at a European level as SHE won the Democracy Innovation in Politics Awards in December 2021. This is the first time this prestigious European award has been won by a project from Ireland.

Our SHESchool workshops are for potential candidates and the women who will support them as part of campaign teams. In November 2021, we had 108 women register for our first foundation workshops. Those who completed the series have now started our practical strategy workshops to put together the nuts and bolts of their campaign strategy. Another 135 women have just commenced our second foundation workshops and are working on getting the groundwork for a local election campaign right.

The second area of the work of SHE that speaks to the citizens’ assembly recommendation is that we are joint secretariat to the Women's Regional Caucus in collaboration with the Association of Irish Local Government. The caucus is a network of 42 women councillors from 13 neighbouring local authorities who have voted by a large majority to support the citizens’ assembly’s recommendation for quotas at local elections.

In an ideal world, gender quotas would not be necessary but in SHE we are dealing with a reality in rural Ireland that requires a sharp acceleration. This is an entrenched reality. Since the formation of the State, only 11 women in total have been elected to Donegal County Council, nine to Clare County Council and six to Leitrim County Council. These statistics are typical across rural Ireland.

Both the SHE programme and the Women’s Regional Caucus are supported by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage under the stewardship of the Minister of State, Deputy Burke. From our strong vantage point at SHE we can see how a policy that supports women in rural Ireland into local politics with SHE’s guidebook and SHESchool workshops and supports a robust network of rural women county councillors in a caucus can be solidly underpinned by the introduction of gender quotas for local elections, and hence our support.

Chairman

Thank you so much Ms Farrell and Dr. Maher for a very succinct and clear overview. I commend you and Women for Election on all the great work in mentoring and supporting women to come forward as candidates. All of you have identified that as a crucial point. The figures on the low levels of participation of women you have give are very stark indeed, in particular outside Dublin where we need to focus specifically, especially at local level. We often focus too much on Dáil representation but it is very helpful to get those figures on local elections.

I welcome our final witness, Dr. Fiona Buckley, from UCC who has been a long-standing champion of increased participation by women in politics. She is a leading academic in the field.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

I thank the Chair and members for the invitation to address them. In my submission and comments, I focus on recommendations Nos. 20, 23 and 24 of the citizens’ assembly report as they relate to political leadership and participation. The proposals laid out in my written submission last March, some of which are highlighted in this opening statement, are intended to generate a conversation about advancing gender equality in political life in Ireland.

To begin, I wish to highlight some research on decision-making.

In US-based business research, led by Erik Larson in 2017, it was found that "inclusive teams make better business decisions". In that study it was found that “all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time, while gender-diverse teams do so 73% of the time”. While this research was conducted in a business setting, its findings are instructive for other decision-making fora, including politics.

The under-representation of women’s presence, voices, perspectives and lived experiences at decision-making tables in Ireland is well documented. In 2009, the Women’s Participation in Politics report of the Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women’s Rights described Ireland as an “unfinished democracy” due to the under-representation of women in politics. Thirteen years on from that report, women remain under-represented in political life. Some of the statistics have been discussed already but it is worth repeating that four of 15 cabinet Ministers are women, five of 20 Ministers of State are women, only 37 of 160 Deputies are women, and 23 of 60 Senators are women. Women account for less than 26% of the members of local authorities and five of 13 MEPs are women. Ireland ranks 21st among the EU 27 for women’s political representation in the Lower House of Parliament and in an international ranking for women’s representation in parliament, Ireland rests in the 100th position.

While the positive effect of legislative gender quotas for general elections is clear - since the law’s adoption, women’s representation in Dáil Éireann has increased by 48% - as Ireland was coming from such a low base prior to the implementation of gender quotas, gender parity in political representation is still some distance away. Across all levels of political decision-making in Ireland, local, national and European, there is plenty of scope for improving gender balance, inclusion and diversity.

One of the measures which the committee may like to give consideration to is extending legislative gender quotas to all elections. One way to operationalise this is through a financial incentive mechanism whereby supplemental funding is made available to parties that select 40% or more women to contest local, Dáil, Seanad and European Parliament elections. Another measure is improving family-friendly practices, including the provision of maternity and parental leave entitlements and supports for public representatives. The announcement in June 2022 of Government approval for a maternity leave scheme for local councillors is very welcome. At the national level, the recommendations of the report of the Forum on a Family Friendly and Inclusive Parliament may be useful to the committee’s work in this regard. This report sets out progress on legislative and constitutional fronts on matters such as maternity leave and remote meetings and voting.

The consequences of online abuse directed at those in public life is underlined in research by Professor Josefina Erikson and colleagues in their research of Swedish Members of Parliament. They found that "men exposed to high levels of online abuse seem slightly more inclined to leave politics whereas women report that they feel that their personal agency is circumscribed to a greater extent". The National Women’s Council’s Toolkit on Social Media Policies for Political Parties, co-authored by Ms Claire McGing and Dr. Valesca Lima, may be useful to the committee’s work on putting in place supports for those subjected to harassment and intimidation, including counselling supports, party codes of conduct and technical supports such as an online anonymous reporting tool.

There is also a need to enhance inclusion and diversity in political participation through diversity measures such as nested quotas, whereby targets for ethnic minority women are set within political parties’ gender quotas. Recent research published by Dr. Pauline Cullen and Mr. Shane Gough, entitled Different Paths, Shared Experiences: Ethnic Minority Women and Local Politics in Ireland, sets out 40 recommendations for change which may be useful to the committee’s work in this regard.

Consideration should be given to targeted funded measures such as those recommended by the Independent Living Movement Ireland, ILMI, in its policy document launched in March of this year. The movement called for a specific fund to level the playing field for disabled people contesting election who face “additional costs due to impairment-related barriers, that non-disabled people do not need to consider”. In the UK, an EnAble Fund for Elected Office was established between 2018 and 2020, with funding provided by the Government Equalities Office.

There is also room for addressing gender biases and stereotypes from an early age. The work of Mr. Cormac Harris and Mr. Alan O’Sullivan, winners of the 2020 BT Young Scientist of the Year, may be instructive in this regard. They examined gender bias and stereotypes about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, subjects and professions among girls and boys aged 57, and have gathered resources to be used by teachers and parents that explicitly target gender bias.

Finally, there could be a role for the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, or the new Electoral Commission in publishing annual gender equality, diversity and inclusion audits of political parties. I am happy to discuss these and other measures in the conversation that will follow.

Chairman

Thank you for being so concise and for giving us such a wide array of different measures in this and your previous submission. I am going to open the floor to questions. I have many myself but I will go to Senator O'Reilly first. Senator O'Reilly is the Vice Chair of this committee.

Senator Pauline O'Reilly

It is lovely to see all of our guests again. I was listening remotely to the contributions and I thank everyone for them. It can often be difficult when everyone is online but at the same time, there are lots of advantages to that as well, particularly when it comes to women in politics. Our guests hit the nail on the head when they said that we need to have more flexible arrangements but that probably applies to an awful lot of work. We often find ourselves in a difficult position because it sounds like we are advocating for ourselves when we are talking about politics but what we are really saying is that we need to open it up so that more women and more people from diverse backgrounds can participate.

I have said previously that this is not just about gender but also about one's family circumstances. When I was elected to Galway City Council there had been no mothers on the previous council. There were women on the council but there were none who had children. We need to remember that in the conversations that we have. What the Green Party has found is that we have lost women councillors who were elected. The issue is not just about being elected but also about sustaining that over one's lifetime and through the changes that happen. I would love to hear our guests' thoughts on that. We have discussed maternity leave but I also think that having a full-time job or a part-time job while also having caring responsibilities is probably too much for anyone. I would welcome our guests' thoughts on that.

Regarding the Seanad in which, as a Senator, I am deeply interested, 40% of the current Seanad are women but that is because of what one could call a manipulation of the system. It is the case that not many women were elected but the Taoiseach's nominees were predominantly women and that made up the deficit. The Green Party only ran women in order to try to redress the imbalance in the Dáil, even from our own party. Are there creative ways to redress the imbalances within politics? One suggestion made previously was to emulate Malta which, as I understand it, has a panel of women and if not enough women are elected, women from the panel are added in order to make sure that politics looks like normal society.

Chairman

Senator O'Reilly has raised a number of issues and I invite Ms Gleeson to respond first.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

In terms of caring responsibilities, I would refer the committee to the National Women's Council toolkit. We need a radical culture shift, particularly in local government but also within the Oireachtas. The Ceann Comhairle has assured us that the implementation of some changes to the running of the Dáil are imminent. Sessions will be run in parallel so that working hours can be shortened. The current situation is not helping anybody with caring responsibilities at all. It is also not helpful in terms of quality of life and is not good for decision-making.

These are practical things that could happen quite quickly if there was a will to do so. In terms of care responsibilities, which brings in the committee's other work on the Constitution, we must get at the disproportionate responsibility of care that is held predominantly by women and the attitudes within society that maintain that. In a previous role I oversaw research that examined attitudes towards decision making in the home, roles within the home and leadership. Some 30% of young men and older men still believe that women should be the main carers and men should be the main managers of the finances. It is worrying that men aged between 18 and 25 still hold these attitudes. The wider constitutional work on valuing care and also looking at the equal distribution of care is critical. We would support that article.

In terms of family-friendly locally, I worked in a partnership company in 2001 and at that point there was farm relief expenses for board members to be able to attend committees but there was no childcare relief or care relief expenses. If we can accommodate the animals being taken care of, we can accommodate children being taken cared of. That should be built in to the expense mechanism within local government.

I welcome very much the proposals from the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke. I am aware that the working group on the non-pay measures in the Moorhead report has put forward a number of measures. The Moorhead report is strong but it is did not go far enough on the role of the councillor and the remuneration of councillors. The role is not as attractive as it could be and it does not have as much support as it should have in terms of basic administrative support for councillors, akin to what Oireachtas Members have. That would be welcome, and would make the role more attractive. We must target women right across the spectrum, from very young, and even into schools, as we in SHE are doing to get young girls more engaged in politics. The research shows that girls are likely to step away at the age of 12 and 13 from an ambition in politics, whereas boys continue. It is equivalent to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, STEM, and to women in sport. As we are celebrating some incredible successes this week, we must look at that in politics as well and our relationship with it. We must make it an attractive role by focusing on the family-friendly piece and the inclusion piece. If we think about families that are more marginalised in society, it is about making the Dáil and the local chambers attractive to those families and how they are represented.

With regard to the Seanad, I do not have the technical solutions and, therefore, I will defer to others but we cannot rely on the will of the Taoiseach and the list system. We welcome that in terms of the intervention because we were concerned when the numbers dropped so low following the Seanad elections. There should be mechanisms in place to ensure there is a quota system on all of the panels. We welcome parties being proactive in that regard, but we should not rely on the will; it should be a standard that we expect. Ultimately, the Houses need to be reflective of society. I will leave it at that.

Chairman

I thank Ms Gleeson very much. I will now call on Ms Farrell or Dr. Maher from See Her Elected.

Ms Tara Farrell

I will come in briefly and then hand over to Dr. Maher. I agree that we need a radical change in the approach to the way things are done, but we do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some good models of working at the moment. For example, we have been doing workshops for political parties and we believe that a lot of the work starts with them. If we are talking about financial incentives, we must also see the results of that in the evidence of party support for candidates rather than just putting somebody on a ticket to make up a quota. It is important that we have meaningful outcomes from those incentives.

Dr. Michelle Maher

I would like to pick up on Senator O'Reilly's concern about the attrition rate among female county councillors because it is something that we share. There is no point in us and our friends in Women for Election doing work to support women into politics if they are not then staying in politics. That is why we extend what we are doing out into campaign teams. We are not just trying to support women to become candidates; we also want well-equipped women to get behind them and to help them get support in rural Ireland. It is one thing that we would like to be able to continue.

In terms of the electoral system itself, I welcome the setting up of an Electoral Commission. The question is how political parties can be incentivised to not only reach quotas for women but also to place them into one of the seats. It is not just a numbers' game. The women candidates need to be supported into seats where they have a chance of winning. As part of its research budget, the Women's Regional Caucus has written to the chairperson of the Electoral Commission to look at how quotas could be introduced and how political parties could be incentivised. Part of the programme within the Women's Regional Caucus is how to make the job more doable for themselves. They are concerned that a lot of council meetings are beginning to slip back to being in person, and that makes it hard to balance for those who are students, and those who have caring responsibilities or another career. Some members cite that local authorities say there are issues with equipment and facilities that must be addressed and supported centrally. That came out strongly as well in the family friendly toolkit that the National Women's Council recently prepared. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, it would seem that there are easy fixes to keep the hybrid method of working in place.

Chairman

I thank Ms Farrell very much. I now call on Dr. Buckley.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

I have a few points to make. On the point about sustaining women in politics, the recent announcement on maternity leave for local councillors is a very positive step in that direction. From the research, I see that when women do leave, often it is after a period of trying to balance the work of being a councillor, possibly full-time employment outside of that, and childcare. A lot of that comes to a head when a councillor has a child for the first time. The maternity leave provisions are quite positive in providing supports for women to take maternity leave. The proposal outlined in the heads of the Bill is a facility to co-opt a substitute. That is a positive first step in sustaining women in politics. It goes without saying that something of that nature needs to be also extended to the national level.

In terms of encouraging greater numbers of women to come forward to the Seanad, and in the selection of women, there might need to be a body of work done on the nominating panels, both the inside and outside panels. Perhaps as part of the process, there could be a rule or regulation on having 40% women on the list of candidates put forward by nominating bodies for election to the Seanad. That might go some way towards addressing the under-representation of women in the Seanad.

Reference was made to Malta, which introduced an electoral law and amended its constitution in 2021, whereby if in the course of a general election fewer than 40% women are elected there is now a capacity to add up to 12 extra seats to the parliament to bring up the proportion of women. I looked at some of the figures yesterday. Malta has jumped from being somewhere around 12% or 13% to 27% as a result of the mechanism introduced last year, which was rolled out for the first time in the recent election in March and April. I do not know how that would work in an Irish context or whether it would be constitutionally possible.

The other issue I would keep an eye on, one which Ms Farrell and I spoke about, is the need to select women to winnable seats. Following the recent census in April, there will obviously be a review of the constituency boundaries, and I understand there is talk of an extra 11 Teachta Dalaí being added. There have been suggestions that we might see an increase in the number of three-seat constituencies. Again, the research shows that a higher district magnitude within a constituency is more favourable to the election of under-represented groups in society. I would be keeping an eye on that, although I would be somewhat cautious because if we see an increase in the number of three-seat constituencies, parties will probably select one candidate at most in some of those constituencies. This will mean they will more than likely go with the tried and tested incumbent. As we see from the figures, just 23% of seats in the Dáil are held by women and 77% of the incumbents are men. Will that be an issue going forward for the selection of women to winnable seats? As I said, that is something to keep an eye out for when the review of the constituency boundaries comes up.

Senator Pauline O'Reilly

I would have liked to have seen six-seat constituencies written into the Electoral Act in order that we could examine whether we could have six-seat constituencies. What is Dr. Buckley's view on that? It would remove the scenario where there may be two three-seat constituencies beside each other by combining them into one six-seat constituency.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

If we have 11 extra Teachta Dalaí, we are probably looking at five-seat constituencies being increased to six-seat constituencies but there is an argument that they be split into two three-seat constituencies. As far as I am aware, and I will point to the constitutional expert on this, while a minimum district magnitude level of three is mentioned in the Constitution, I do not think we have a higher upper limit. Back in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, it would have been regular to have had constituency sizes of more than five, six, seven or eight seats. It is only since the late 1940s, and certainly since the 1980s, that the commission reviewing constituencies directed a maximum of five seats.

We can look back at the transcript but I think his point was that there are many more barriers that quotas alone cannot address. I think we all agree with that. Some of the barriers we ended up discussing at length were low pay and, as the witnesses outlined, the difficulty of juggling a full-time job in the case of many councillors, the supposedly part-time role of a councillor and family or caring responsibilities, which fall disproportionately on women. These are impeding women from entering local politics but also from staying in local politics. That has been an interesting exchange.

How do we change this? See Her Elected, in focusing on the rural divide, put those figures very clearly. Outside of Dublin, the figures are very low and in some counties, they are extremely low. How should that be tackled? Quotas are one method and the Citizens' Assembly recommended that we extend quotas to local elections. There is a difficulty with the sanction. At national level, we were able to impose the very severe sanction of loss of half of political funding for parties that do not meet the general election quota because, as we know, political funding is tied to general election performance. Dr. Buckley pointed out the incentivised approach taken at local level whereby parties gain more funds if they meet the quota for local elections.

That is a really sensible proposal and there already are soft measures in this regard. Will the witnesses expand on that and how we can address the scarcity of women candidates at local level? When we looked at this issue in 2009, the evidence showed that when women stand for election, they have as much chance as men of being elected. The barrier is not at the electorate level; the barrier is getting onto the ticket and the support needed in bringing women onto the ticket. I ask the witnesses to comment on that and the specific measures for both local and general elections. How would a quota work for local government and what are the other key measures that need to be taken to address the issue?

At local election level, there is not the same commute issue, which is a huge concern in Dáil elections for those with caring responsibilities. It is not as big an issue at local elections. At one seminar we held here, a view was expressed that local elections should be great for people with caring responsibilities because local government hours can facilitate, or could be made to facilitate, those responsibilities because the role is supposed to be part-time. I ask the witnesses to comment on that.

What timelines do the witnesses see as necessary to achieve the action plan to get to 50:50 representation by 2030? The citizens' assembly has given us some timelines. We have already missed the timeline given in recommendation No. 20 of expanding the gender quota by the end of 2022. Are there any other key timelines that should be identified?

On the referendum issue, we in this committee have said it should be held in 2023. Are there any comments on that? The Taoiseach told us yesterday the Government is committed to holding a referendum and doing so as soon as possible. The Tánaiste told us last week a year's lead-in would be needed to run a successful referendum from the date of the decision being made by the Cabinet.

I have covered a lot of issues. The key question is how we bring forward more women. What are the key measures needed to address the still shockingly low levels of women's representation, particularly at local level? I will go in reverse order this time and ask Dr. Buckley to respond first.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

On the commute issue, it depends on where a person is located. It can still be a big issue for local candidates. In my county, the Cork County Council building is on the outskirts of the city but somebody might be coming up from, say, Castletownbere. That can still pose an issue.

Women are coming forward to stand for election. We have seen a contagion effect arising from the gender quota at national level. If we look at the numbers for women's candidacy at local elections, it has risen from the 314 who ran in 2009 to 560 in 2019, which was something like a 78% increase. However, that varies across different political parties. At the 2019 local elections, all parties bar Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael met the minimum 30% threshold. There is still a need for consistent increases across the board and some incentive measure to encourage the political parties to support women's candidacy and put women forward for election. There is a need for the extension of the gender quota at local level.

Many of the issues we are talking about today have only come to light as a result of women's presence in political institutions. One of the main reasons for that is the gender-quota legislation that was brought in ten years ago, in 2012. Gender quotas are one part of a suite of packages but they must be there. If they are not, as we saw prior to their introduction, the rate of increase is very slow. It is only with women's presence in political institutions and increasing numbers of women in politics that we are beginning to see a lot of the issues we are discussing today coming to light. Many of the ways, practices and processes of how politics did its business for so long were done under an assumption that politicians were free of caring responsibilities and would not get pregnant. Many of those practices were in place 100 years ago. That is why I am still very strong on the need for quotas.

The Chair is right that the electorate does not have any bias against women. The research on this is quite strong and the work of Dr. Lisa Keenan, Dr. Mary Brennan and Professor Gail McElroy on the recent elections confirms it. It has been a trend for the past ten, 15, 20 or even 30 years. If the electorate does not have a bias against women and is not discriminating against them but women are still not coming forward, then the key focus should be on the parties as gatekeepers. We keep having to come back to that.

Going back to Senator Pauline O'Reilly's point, and touching on what the Taoiseach has said around the need for wider levels of support, the question arises as to whether there is space within local government for extra administrative supports for the work of councillors. In research I did with Women for Election and other research I have done with my colleague, Dr. Aodh Quinlivan, in UCC, working with the women's caucus of Cork City Council, this is something that features in the information coming back to us. If there were more supports on the administration side of the work, that might, as Senator O'Reilly said, assist with the situation whereby most of our councillors are trying to balance their councillor role with employment elsewhere. In the eyes of the State, the role of a councillor is still very much seen as a part-time one, whereas recent research indicates councillors spend an average of approximately 32 hours per week on council work. There may be space to treat it more as a full-time role. I did not hear what the Taoiseach said yesterday but the question of making levels of support available might be something that could be considered.

Ms Tara Farrell

I have a few brief points to make, one of which follows on from Dr. Buckley's input. Since 2009, we in the women's manifesto group in Longford have been calling for things like job descriptions for councillors and for it to be seen as a legitimate career path as opposed to something, as Dr. Buckley noted, that is seen as part-time.

Regarding the change that is needed, as I said earlier, there are a lot of models of good practice. It is really important to look at the roles of civil society and organisations like ours and Women for Election. From our perspective in See Her Elected, we are very much a grassroots organisation and very focused on rural constituencies. We can reach women in rural Ireland, which is really important. Political education is what will bring about a lot of the change that is needed. We know women are very enthusiastic and hungry for political education. We have seen more than 700 women taking part in our online SHE school, particularly during the Covid period. That appetite is out there and it is really important that organisations like ours continue to be resourced and supported to ensure women have all the information they need through, for example, the guidebook, the associated workshops and so on. Having that information enables them to make informed decisions about running for office.

I appreciate that the commute for local government candidates may not be the same as it is for the Dáil but, as Dr. Buckley pointed out, in counties like Cork and Galway, it is a long way, say, from east Galway to the Aran Islands. There are very remote and rural areas in this country we are able to reach by virtue of being a grassroots organisation. It is really important to bear in mind the role civil society plays in this change.

Dr. Michelle Maher

On the question of the commute, my county of Donegal comes to mind as well.

Regarding the Chair's reference to the Taoiseach's comment about whether quotas would help to overcome some of the other barriers, I would argue very strongly that they will. We have research that tells us women wait to be asked to run for election. When that request comes, it often comes quite late in the day, which means women do not have time to prepare. Sometimes, the whole election experience can be quite an adverse one for them.

One of the things that now exists, which the Chair asked about, is an action plan from our own perspective in rural Ireland. We were being asked by women in SHESchool where do you start if you are not from a political party or if you are not from one of these political families where the council chair has been passed down from grandfather to father to son, which is sometimes what it seems like. If you are not in one of those families, where do you start? For the first time in Ireland, there is a starting point and a guidebook available to every woman in the country for free to show where to start. That speaks to the action plan. To complement that guidebook, there is a strong action plan, which started in November 2021 with ourselves. We started so early because we wanted to start asking women in 2021, which was years out from the local elections, to start thinking about running or about being part of a campaign team, to get behind a woman who may be an existing councillor or somebody who is new to politics and to start working on those foundations and on that groundwork for their election campaign. This is crucial in rural Ireland because who you are and your profile need to be established years out, not just from the election but from the selection conventions within the parties, which will be starting as early as next summer. Women did not know that they needed to be a member of a party to be able to have a vote for themselves. Of course, they do not need to be a member to be a candidate for it but they do in order to vote for themselves and to bring their own supporters into a party. That kind of information all feeds into the action plan whereby people put that foundation together and they then can start to build their campaign and canvassing strategies on a rock-solid foundation.

Dr. Buckley spoke about the balancing of the existing councillors. In the Women’s Regional Caucus, there is almost a political experiment going on. This is because for the first time, we have 42 female councillors across 13 largely rural local authorities. They were creating for themselves a new political institution within the structures of local government. They themselves had to slot into existing ways of doing business in county councils. These are ways of doing business that were established when a woman in there was as rare as hen’s teeth. They did not want to fall into a trap of just replicating the way councils do business. They were not afraid to experiment either and to see what worked. For example, plenary meetings are held online where possible and for women who cannot attend because of work outside of their council work commitments, there are summary catch-up meetings. Any voting is done electronically, with the period of voting being left open for eight or ten hours to allow everybody to participate. Where I am going with all of that is that things do not always have to be done the way they have been done. The family-friendly toolkit that was prepared by the National Women’s Council of Ireland by Sinéad Doody sets out much of that in detail, with recommendations for local authorities. We would like those recommendations to be implemented.

Chairman

That is great. It is good to hear about the good practices that are going on.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

I do not want to repeat too much of what has already been said but I support it. In Women for Election's formative years, there was a response to providing training in advance of elections. This was in response to the need that had been identified when the Lisbon treaty referendum was taking place. Our founders identified the need because women said they did not know how to access politics. For ten years, Women for Election have been tailoring programmes to meet the emerging needs. From approximately 2019, post the local elections, what became more possible was to be able to resource the advanced training programmes, such as our campaign schools like the INSPIRE campaign school and our new EQUIP campaign school, as well as all of the taster programmes and master classes, which have been working to equip women way out. It is one of the first messages in our campaign schools. That, along with the work that SHE is doing is quite critical, in order that women can unlock politics far in advance.

To address the initial questions, in response to the issue of the deflection by the Taoiseach yesterday on the issue of the quotas, this is not the first time I have heard it and I am disappointed to see that deflection again. I echo both the previous speakers’ points on the missed opportunity in 2014 to not to have had quotas in for local elections. That is what we are feeling now on the ground. Local politics is suffering because we do not have women right across the country. At the end of this year, Women for Election is due to launch a new data hub, which is a national mapped dynamic programme. We are working on it with a number of academics, namely, the All-Island Research Observatory and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. It is visually mapping the 23 local electoral areas, LEAs, where there are no women. I happen to live in one in Sligo where there is no woman. I come from another in Clare in Killaloe where there is no women elected. To grow up with that and to see that you do not have a choice, it is not even around the policies, but you do not have a choice in 23 of the LEAs.

As for the critical piece around the quotas, Dr. Buckley has talked about the financial incentives. We would go further, and I referred to this in my opening statement, to bring in the penalties as well. The Citizens’ Assembly made as a recommendation that penalties would be included and it is important that this is maintained. We have a package and certainly even an incentive to kick it off but the standard we need to be establishing in politics is not even a target for quotas. It is that we get to a place where politics is seen as an equal place for our entire society and that the diversity of women and men is represented in our chambers. It is a critical piece.

I am concerned that we will miss the 2024 opportunity. The 40% Dáil quotas, which will be from 2023 onwards, are putting more pressure on the parties to make sure that they get more women on the tickets but it will not sustain that. We have no shortage of women who want to come forward and no shortage of women who want to get elected. Ms Reilly will speak shortly about how those women need to be supported and not having those last-minute advertisements.

In terms of the action plan, when I came into the post, I was quite struck that there is no national strategy to get to 50:50. There is, under the national strategy for women and girls, one action that is held under local government and is focused on local government. We referred in our opening statement to what we see the need for, which is a stepped-out plan that includes getting the quotas in place before 2024. It should have all of these. We have ingredients on the table and we do not have to do an awful lot of soul searching. I note that Ms Reilly and I are both wearing black and white today. It is quite straightforward and it is distinctive. However, what we have not had is a co-ordinated Government response on it. There are opportunities within the wider recommendations of the assembly to slip that into the gender-equality unit in order that there is an agency to hold that but it is a matter of resources.

At the moment, we are reliant on donations to continue our work. It is not feasible for the likes of Women for Election or for SHE to be reliant on ad hoc funding when our roles are quite critical. We look forward to the day that we become redundant and I mean that quite genuinely. We think it is possible to achieve this work. Ireland is suffering by not having diversity at the tables. In terms of the local quotas and the general quotas, the committee will have the National Traveller Women's Forum Ireland before it next week. Earlier, the work by Dr. Pauline Cullen and Dr. Shane Gough was referred to, and it is quite critical. We have never elected a Traveller woman anywhere in Ireland to Government, which is a shocking indictment of our democracy. It is our native ethnic-minority population, and we have no representation for it, with the exception of Senator Flynn, who has brought such a contribution in that short time, being nominated to the Seanad. Among all of the population groups there has been no elected ethnic-minority woman locally or nationally to the Dáil. These are things that have to radically change.

On a co-ordinated strategy, I support the full-time role being recognised at local government. The role is misrepresented in many ways. There are practical things and I defer again to the National Women’s Council of Ireland's toolkit. We worked closely with the council and with other groups to see things being developed, such as training for chairs and cathaoirligh locally and with even the hybrid meetings in order that meetings will run efficiently. These long, never-ending meetings are not conducive to that, particularly for people who are time poor, who are predominantly women.

I will speak on a final area, before I hand over to Ms Reilly. She will speak about work we are doing in Offaly at present, where there is one woman out of 19 councillors and about the resistance we are meeting in doing that work that is focused on women only in Offaly itself. There is also the area of abuse of women in public life, which we have not really touched on today. Then there is the issue of security and safety for women in public life, which is disproportionate because while the issue affects men in public life, we have a greater issue in terms of women in public life.

We have legislation that is quite good and there is some coming in that can be strengthened but what we do not have are resourced and trained implementation mechanisms. The committee will be familiar with my 20 years of previous work in the field of gender-based violence and my credentials. We do not yet have a system that is effective for anyone who is experiencing gender-based abuse, particularly women. What I have seen since coming into public life is that politicians are expected to come in wearing a thick skin. That is not okay and not enough. We should be able to enter into public spaces and exert a right to represent people without fear or threat for our own safety or our families' safety. We should commend all politicians who have continued to endure and survive that with a very brave and upfront face. It is not okay and we need to look at mechanisms around that.

Ms Megan Reilly

I will touch on a few points that have been brought up in the discussion. It is a multifaceted issue and we are trying to touch on all the points here. Regarding political parties, many parties have their own internal structures to increase diversity and the number of women involved. That is great but quite often we meet with a certain attitude. Politics is by its nature competitive but there is almost a trade secrets approach to it. That is something that women and other minority groups need to be let into. All have echoed their support for the local quotas today. They are a short, sharp shock against those decades of incumbency and will help us get over those structural and cultural barriers much faster. It is a very positive thing for the parties as well because it helps increase the pipeline towards the likes of the Dáil and the Seanad. A lot of that starts locally. We would definitely support that.

I want to touch on one of the points Dr. Buckley made about the administrative functions and support for those. We have sometimes come up against this issue. Even when dealing with councils, there can be a lack of funding for secretariats for women's caucuses. They are formed as semi-formal or informal structures but often once funding runs out there is no way for that to continue. We all recognise women's caucuses and the parliamentary women's caucus is a great vehicle to support and maintain women's involvement in politics.

Ms Gleeson referred to the Offaly programme we are doing at the moment. It is fair to say there has been resistance in certain sectors. It is definitely a reminder of the old attitudes that are out there that we need to counteract. We need education and information around this, about why we have quotas in place and why there are going to be quotas in place. I imagine that will meet with resistance as well, unless there is a conversation. We are definitely leading a conversation on that at the moment but we need to continue that conversation. We have found, and hopefully it will pay off, that concentrated work is best. That involves going into a county and doing concentrated work around developing a pipeline of candidates across the various parties supporting women. That goes back to the party aspect, whereby women need to be supported right from the moment of joining a party up until the moment of candidacy. It also relates to the issue of not putting women into unwinnable seats and being very clear with candidates. Oftentimes when people run, they will not win the first time. That is okay but there needs to be honest conversations around that so that women are not met with rejection and are well aware that sometimes it is a long game they are playing.

The role of the councillor needs examination. It is more friendly towards certain professions that allow people to go into council seats. On the responsibilities of care, we have had discussions with councillors who have said remote meetings are a positive but I worry that it is falling to women on individual councils to have to lobby in order to get remote voting and hybrid meetings in place. That is a real benefit and we have heard from women with caring responsibilities that it is a real benefit for them as well. I touched on many points there but hopefully covered it all.

Chairman

I thank the witnesses for those full responses. We covered a lot of ground there. I call Senator Warfield.

Senator Fintan Warfield

I apologise for being late but I read the opening statements last night and this morning. This is a conversation I often have with Sinéad, who helps me out with this committee. Between 1989 and 1994, the European Parliament had 20% women and the Dáil today has 23% women. That is how long it has taken us to catch up but it is also a sign of how slow we have been with regard to the challenge on our hands and how important this conversation is in terms of what the Parliament of our country looks and feels like. I have a question about the mechanism for the incentives for political parties. Last year the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage allocated €150,000 to political parties to increase female participation in the next local elections. It is expected to provide that funding again in 2022 and 2023. In order to access those funds, political parties have to set out strategic timelines over the next three years as to how they will support and prepare female candidates in the run-up to the local elections in 2024. Should the Government consider providing a regular funding stream but attach a condition of local election quotas in order to access those moneys? Is that the incentive piece or is that the mechanism that could be the incentive piece? I hear the witnesses loud and clear about the importance of introducing penalties. Ms Gleeson mentioned the deflection by the Taoiseach yesterday but we have also heard that stalling from the Department around penalties and how we will do this. I personally would not be that optimistic about the quota being introduced by 2024. That is hard to acknowledge because the witnesses have outlined the missed opportunity the 2019 elections were. It seems parties are still trying to come to terms with the idea that we need a quota at local level. Would that mechanism be the place for that incentive in the future?

Chairman

We are very keen to investigate this point given that the citizens' assembly recommendation No. 20 was so clear on this issue so I thank Senator Warfield for raising that.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

The concern I have around the resistance locally is that it is turkeys voting for Christmas. I ask new staff coming in or anybody who wants to really understand what the problem is in local government in Ireland to go the websites of all the county councils around Ireland and exclude the urban areas. We have the same faces going back 20 years and longer, people who have either inherited seats or are there with an expectation that these are their seats. I am not mincing my words when I say that. The resistance we meet when we go into counties, particularly the female deficit counties, is huge. There is a resistance to our work and there is a resistance to quotas. These are the people who are voting for the leaders of parties and who will continue to drive political parties. We see great engagement. I particularly welcome that incentive scheme from the Government for funding diversity officers and funding roles within the parties. We are seeing that make a difference at a national party level. I do not know yet how that is going to play out when women are selected to run in 2024 for seats where there are incumbents. Will they be supported within their local party areas by the incumbents or those expecting to take up those incumbent roles?

We are not overly mad about relying on the incentives. The previous incentive scheme was referred to informally as the headage scheme as it was per head. The money that is going in is quite small. It is coming out of the same fund that is funding the initiatives Women for Election, She and other NGOs are running, as well as local councils. There is a very small pot there. The incentives need to have teeth if the parties are actually going to want them. That is where we are recommending a penalty mechanism. We see the incentives as a sort of igniter piece.

The penalties need to be embedded in our system so we do not fall back. This is where matters stand with quotas.

Senator Fintan Warfield

What would Ms Gleeson say to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage when it states that it is tied to Dáil funding?

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

There are mechanisms. I am not a legal expert. It is one of the things we have not had the resources to do. We have been working with the National Women's Council and a group of NGOs to look at this. We have not had the benefit of legal expertise because we do not have the resources to pay for it. One of suggestions Women for Election is putting forward - and I have also heard politicians suggest this - is a straightforward fines mechanism based on the turnover of a party on a percentage basis. A standard could be built in, whether through SIPO or the electoral commission, that our political parties must achieve. It would be a standard that we have diversity in representation. We have not been living with 100 years of a male quota; it is a standard. We have to lift our thinking on this and look at penalising parties when they do not meet a standard. We are speaking about the core institutions of the State where power affects everybody's lives. I will not mince words on this. This is how we have to come at it. We have been very polite and moving around the edges.

I have great regard for the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. The Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, has done tremendous work since he took office. The officials have also done great work, but they are not involved in overall government. They are involved in local government and they are not invested in the overall picture. It is not for civil servants to determine how to change government. That is not their role. They are not employed to do this. This committee has an opportunity to make strong recommendations to drive this forward.

Chairman

It is great to get this clarity.

Senator Fintan Warfield

Now that we will have a permanent electoral commission, is Ms Gleeson optimistic about everything that can flow from it? There is a comment I want to make, which I have made at every meeting. It is about the Seanad election. It is bizarrely complicated but it presents many opportunities to increase representation of diversity in the Houses and gender representation. I have put this on record previously.

Chairman

Dr. Buckley has addressed the point about the Seanad and may want to comment on this.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

I stated earlier that the possibility of ensuring greater gender balance and diversity on the Seanad panels may be through introducing a mechanism on candidate nominations and specifying that at least 40% must be women. If we want an incentive measure and if it is not financial, perhaps it could be a list-rejection system or something of that nature. If the nominating bodies do not have a certain proportion of women, in this case we suggest 40%, we could go back and say the list will be rejected and to go away for a number of days or a week and come back with a gender-balanced list. Perhaps this is a way of working around it.

I will follow up on what Ms Gleeson said about local elections. She mentioned that many people have been working on and speaking about local government and how we could operationalise the gender quota. As Ms Gleeson said, we do not have the legal expertise or the constitutional expertise. We know that State funding of political parties is connected to their Dáil election performance. This is where finding a mechanism to work towards an incentive measure is coming from. It is also about tightening up. The 2019 arrangement was based on 30% or showing improvement in the direction of 30%. Certainly, we must be very clear if we go down the road of financial incentives that it is tied to 40% and that there is no question about it.

Where we do not have legal advice - and I do not know whether it is even possible, but I am throwing it into the mix - is on whether there is a mechanism to change how State funding of political parties is calculated. Could it be partly based on Dáil performance and partly on performance in local elections? I do not know. I am not quite sure. I do not have the legal expertise. This is thinking outside the box. Is this something that could be looked at? I have heard other suggestions about tying funding to the membership rate of women in political parties. Is this something that could be looked at?

It is quite interesting that there are no legislative gender quotas in the Scandinavian region. There are voluntary party quotas. Parties of the left originally introduced them and there was a contagion effect across the party system. Keeping this in mind, earlier we spoke about a possible role for SIPO or the electoral commission in publishing annual gender and diversity audits of political parties. If they must concede that they are not performing well, would having available this publicly declared information be an incentive in some respects for parties to attract a diverse base to party membership? Could funding be linked to women's party membership rates? Again, this would need more legal and perhaps constitutional research. I am afraid I am not able to comment any further. These are some suggestions I have seen or heard being spoken about to try to operationalise a form of quota for all elections.

Senator Fintan Warfield

Many excellent suggestions have been made which will inform the report and it has been a very valuable discussion. The first of my questions will be about the issue of commuting and rural local electoral areas, LEAs. What people forget is that it is not just about the meetings of the council. A considerable amount of the work of a councillor is meeting people and there is considerable travel involved. I know there is considerable travel involved in my own constituency. In the run-up to an election one could be going to three public meetings a night just to try to reach everybody and to hear what people's concerns are. I am not sure how to address that.

When we are looking to get people to run, we have to be honest with people that is what the job entails and that it is not just about the monthly meeting. Whether that is online or not online is important but it is not the be all and end all. Do the witnesses have any suggestions around that? Although it has been helpful that many more of those public meetings are online.

What strikes me is the importance of the political parties in this of which we are all aware. Dr. Maher spoke about the competitive nature of politics which we cannot forget. Parties want people to be re-elected in constituencies. This is why I brought up the issue of winnable seats with the Taoiseach yesterday and, again, did not get a response. We have not really got a mechanism to ensure that political parties put women in winnable seats, especially the larger parties, because they have many incumbents and they are battling it out against other large parties in those constituencies. They feel that an unknown person who may not have been elected previously might not stand the best chance. I am reading between the lines, having spoken to an awful lot of politicians who are men and feel that they have been put at a disadvantage. However, we have to start somewhere and quotas cannot deal with that. What else can we do to deal with it? The solution may be around culture.

Volunteers or what some parties will call political activists within their own parties do not fully understand the importance of asking women to run, which I know Ms Farrell and Dr. Maher touched on. I see that more and more. Most people know that men do not need to be asked and women need to be asked. That is what all of the research shows.

Is there an opportunity for some of the witnesses' organisations to do training for group chairs across political parties in order that it is not just about candidates or campaign managers, but also about informing those who run selection conventions throughout the country at a grassroots level?

We have not really touched on social media but it is the number 1 problem women tell me about. Their biggest concern with entering politics is social media and that kind of exposure. One is never off. One is always on. I get quite disgusting private messages that nobody ever hears about. I think that women get more of that than men and that is what the research shows. We cannot leave the committee without having addressed that this fundamental point is putting women off running.

Chairman

It is important to say that the citizens' assembly has highlighted that in recommendation 24 and some of the witnesses touched on it earlier. I thank Senator O'Reilly for a very clear list of points.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

We understand and know social media to be a magnification of lifelong abuse, unfortunately, towards people in public life in particular. There are ways this can be changed with regard to the responsibility and accountability for the platforms that facilitate it and do not manage reporting in an effective way. There is the tick-box management of reporting and then there is the effective management of it.

I do not wish to use the word "training" but the mechanisms should be there to support women in public life to be able to limit what they are exposed to. I am on the advisory committee for Meta for women's safety and I am witnessing how there is potential for algorithms to stop the abuse coming. It should not be there but one of the problems is that we are dealing with a very racist, misogynistic and homophobic world and this is escalated most with bots, trolls and real people doing this online.

People should be sanctioned with prosecutions through the legislation we have in place already, of which there is more coming in. We are trying to change the behaviour. The platforms can do more but it is the behaviour we are trying to change. Sanctions are quite critical and their public profiling is also important.

With regard to the culture change, in the year and a half since I have come in, I am hearing great commitment from national party levels. I am seeing great work being done across all the parties and commend that. I wish to put that on record. However, I am also seeing resistance. From 20 years of working on responding to gender inequality in Ireland, I know the subtle resistance. I know the smile.

What we actually need to do is to address 100 years of the male quota and to call on all our male colleagues, both within the party structures and outside them, to look at male privilege. Unfortunately, this is going to require men who may have aspirations to run or to run again to see if they really want to have a changed democracy. Can we start to see men put their hands up and say they will stand aside and create the space for an equally competent woman to be supported to run in a winnable seat? That is the sort of shift that we will need. Some 44 incumbents in the Dáil will need to vacate their seats for us to get to 50:50 representation. That is what it amounts to. It is that kind of real leadership that is needed from men who are incumbents but also from men within parties.

Asking women to run is really important. We have the Count Her In campaign running on that basis and encouraging people to look around them. Unfortunately, women still need to be asked. Many of the programmes we are working on are looking at breaking down that syndrome of needing to be asked. Some of the most successful female candidates had to be asked many times before they ran and we understand the reason. The work and more awareness within parties and the funding coming in around incentivising that should drive that more. We see some parties doing more than others. The longer established parties have a bigger mountain to climb, particularly in terms of incumbency.

On the rural commute, as someone who lives in a rural part of Ireland and has the revolving door parenting role running as we speak, that balance of being able to fulfil one's duties as a public representative and one's responsibilities as an employee and as a parent or a carer is something that is challenging when one enters public life but there are ways and we have referred to them a few times.

In terms of hybrid meetings, this meeting is a great example. They are not resourced as well around the country, so we need some more tech solutions around that. Dr. Maher touched on that earlier in terms of councils that are doing that well and I think Ms Reilly referred to it. At the moment women are having to advocate for these to be retained. There is a pushback coming in from some of the councils. Covid was a hard time for everybody but it showed us the potential to be more efficient, to be more effective with time and how to make it more accessible. That is why we refer to the constitutional reform we think is needed, based on the legal advice that is there. If those in the Parliament can be online and participate in meetings, there is no reason one cannot be online in Falcarragh, Belmullet, Killaloe or wherever one is outside Dublin and participate fully as a Member of the Oireachtas.

These are the issues we can address that we did not have to think about 100 years ago when we were designing a Constitution. They are within our grasp now. We really urge that shift which could happen if put the whole suite of measures together quite quickly.

Ms Megan Reilly

On Senator O'Reilly's piece on the competition I mentioned, as Ms Gleeson said, I think mentorship is really important and individuals within parties understanding the role they can play in encouraging women to go forward. Training for group chairs was mentioned. That is something we would definitely be happy to do. It is really important that we engage with men in this conversation and that we engage with people as early as possible. That is why we have been trying to have the conversation with schools. I cannot stress the education piece enough, around having the conversation so that people understand the need for more women in politics. We are in the county with the lowest representation in local government, with one woman out of 19, and there is still a sense among some people of men being sidelined. There is going to be an issue when we get to the quotas, which we absolutely need to. Having conversations as much as possible is crucial.

Dr. Michelle Maher

I will start with social media. It is correct that this conversation cannot be had without touching on social media. The regional women's caucus consists of 42 councillors across 13 local authorities. There is a cohort within that caucus that would express a lack of confidence in promoting their work within their communities because of a fear of saying something wrong or facing a backlash on social media. However, it is the nature of our electoral system that localism is promoted, so being visible, especially in rural Ireland, is very important.

Within our programmes, we deal with the reality of this. In rural Ireland, with the large distances involved, a canvass might mean getting to three or four houses in an hour given the time spent getting out of the car, opening the gate and going up the lane. That would be replicated a few times. It is different in a more urban areas. Social media, therefore, has to form a key component of an overall campaign strategy for women running in the local elections in rural Ireland. That is why we build digital self care and self defence into our programmes as part of preparing women for local elections. Outside of quotas, what are the other avenues to get more women involved? We can have supporting programmes like ours and others and start on time. It was very important for us to get our guidebook out in 2021. That contains the importance of raising one's profile well in advance of an election. As early as Easter 2022, we recommended that women start to do a soft canvass. It might only be five doors in their local area but we recommended they start that soft canvass. Perhaps they are not declaring themselves as potential candidates but they are finding out what issues are important to their members.

We put a lot of work into preparing for selection conventions. This goes back to the point that political parties are key in all for this. The selection convention is really the first election and women should treat it as such. For women who are interested in joining a party or who are in a party, we already have most of them putting their names forward to be local area representatives. This gives a person some level of standing both within the party and within the community. The people voting will get to know them and see that they are not voting for them because they are a woman. Rather, they are voting for them because of what they will be able to do for the community as a county councillor.

In my opening statement, I spoke about the importance of quotas as underpinning programmes that are already in place in rural Ireland for the local elections.

Ms Tara Farrell

I have two very quick points. On the remote access, as Dr. Maher pointed and as others acknowledged, it has been really important for us to be able to access this meeting remotely, given where we are located. However, it is happening across local councils at the moment. For example, I have a local community development committee, LCDC, meeting in Longford this afternoon which is being held remotely. There is a great sense of encouragement from the local authorities to be embracing this technology. It is really important that is extended across the board. As women with caring responsibilities, trying to fit in a million other things as well, and who, as Ms Gleeson pointed out, are very time poor, it is very important that the technology is embraced. The technology is there in many areas. I know we have an issue with broadband but that is for another day.

I will make a very quick point on the incentives and the penalties. The financial incentives are very welcome. We would all acknowledge that. However, it depends on the level of incentive and whether that level is enough to encourage parties to really embrace this meaningfully. The self regulation we have seen, in particular in terms of gender quotas on boards in other countries, does not work as effectively and the pace of change is too slow. We are looking to 2024 and ahead to 2029. We really need to see a lot more efficient action taken on this so that we can see the impact of those measures.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

On social media, I was interested in a recent paper by the data analyst, Ian Richardson, where he analysed across a year, the tweets directed at public representatives in Ireland. While he did not identify any significant difference in the level of abusive tweets that men and women in the Dáil were receiving, there was a stark difference at local level and at Seanad level.

Women in local government were getting eight times more abusive tweets than men. In the Seanad women were getting three times more abusive tweets than men. It is a very real issue. We know from UK and European research that the level of abuse that women of colour and LGBTQI+ women get is intensified even more. What we need to stop doing or what may have been happening in the past was that people were expected to put up with it as there was a sense that this is the cut and thrust of politics. That approach needs to stop. Increasingly, we are seeing more people speak publicly about the abuse they are receiving. That is a difficult thing for a person to do, but it is also very important because it is shining attention on this. Ultimately, as the political scientist Mona Lena Krook asserts, much of this online abuse is deliberately designed to try to silence politicians and given that women are getting more than men, it is very much trying to silence women's voices and perspectives.

As Dr. Maher from See Her Elected mentioned, the self-care approach is very important, but equally the UN, the Council of Europe and the EU have all recommended that legislation on violence against women in politics be introduced. If we wish to eliminate it, the penalty must be criminalisation and prosecution of online violence. They are the mechanisms that need to be looked at to address this.

The point about political parties and political party activists asking women to run is vitally important. Both Women for Election and See Her Elected elections will show that women need to be asked to run three to five times.

The other interesting issue that came out of the research we carried out for the More Women: Changing the Face of Politics report that we did for Women for Election, was that many women spoke about not getting any feedback after an election. They may have contested an election and did not win. They were then not given any guidance post election, such as a debrief or feedback and they were very much left to their own devices. As Ms Reilly said, people need to be honest that at the outset a woman might not win and it is important to come back and work with that person to encourage, support and maintain her interest.

Strong political leadership is needed in respect of the selection of women to winnable seats and it has to come from the top. The leadership simply has to come straight from the top and if there is dissent in political parties, it will need to be dealt with through strong leadership and support from the top level. That is the key way. In Ireland we do not have a proportional representation, PR, list system. We cannot build placement mandates into the list.

It is a completely different issue, but if we were to perhaps start looking at randomising the list of candidates on the ballot paper - currently we list candidates alphabetically - perhaps there would be a mechanism to introduce a form of placement mandate where every second candidate listed is a woman, but legislation would be required to randomise the ballot paper. I mentioned this 13 years ago at another committee meeting and people in the House with surnames beginning with A, B, and C were not very happy with me when I made that suggestion. It might be something that could be considered.

Chairman

Dr. Buckley's surname begins with B too.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Exactly, I would be speaking against myself.

Chairman

I thank all the witnesses. We are drawing to a close. One non-committee member wishes to contribute. If all committee members have concluded their questioning I will invite Senator Boyhan to briefly contribute. I am sure I do not need to ask the Senator to stay within the remit of this committee and to respect the ruling of the Chair.

Senator Victor Boyhan

I thank the Chair for facilitating me to participate in the meeting. I was laughing when Dr. Buckley spoke about random selection because the witness is named Buckley, the Chair is named Bacik and I am named Boyhan. We are Bs and I like being up at the top. It is an advantage and incumbents also have an advantage. That is an important point to make, as according to all the statistics, people who are elected and seek election again have an advantage and it has been shown in a lot of research.

I only have a few comments to make. I sit on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage and we have dealt with many of the issues this committee has talked about, although perhaps not in as in-depth a manner as this committee has. I support diverse people coming into politics, including women, men, young people and older people. If I had my way, people would vote and participate in elections at a younger age, but we have not come to that yet.

I will share a few thoughts with the witnesses. I listened to their engagement with the committee on the monitor in my office and there was a recurring theme of political parties. I am an Independent Senator. I was elected as a party member. The party, the Progressive Democrats, subsequently wound down. I wanted to continue to engage in politics so I became an Independent candidate. I had an advantage as I had been through the mill but many women who I work very closely with are Independents and were elected the first time out in the last local elections and they are hoping to run again. That is brilliant. It is a far tougher operation when candidates are on their own and they have to be self-starters. I am reminded of a seasoned politician in the Oireachtas who told me not to forget that when we come into the Houses we are all sole traders. Many politicians talk about being sole traders, which I do not necessarily believe.

I will say a few things. Clearly we want local government and politics generally to reflect the people in society because that is positive. Sufficient emphasis, money or resources have not been put into mentoring more women, particularly independent women, to enter politics. I ask everyone to be mindful of that. Many people are embedded in their communities in a whole range of community activities and advocacy groups and feel they cannot get into politics or it is not for them. We need to be mindful that it is not all about the parties mopping up all of the talent locally. Some people may wish to go the independent route and with that in mind, we have set up a funding mechanism to promote independent candidates entering politics and the Department is funding some of this. I will be able to share more detail on it. It is very important and I acknowledge the support from the Department. It is important that I feed that into the committee's-----

Chairman

Is that an initiative of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage?

Senator Victor Boyhan

Yes, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. I will feed the information we have on that into the committee because it is important.

The local authorities already have a mandate to promote diversity and respect. That is an important point. I wish all new people coming into politics well. I will also mention ageism. I spoke recently to a principal a year after she retired who was active and high up in the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, INTO. She was a principal of one of the biggest national schools in south County Dublin. She was a fundraiser for the GAA and immersed in her community through the TidyTowns competition. When she suggested she might go into politics, she was told she was past it. She told me she was 66 and had no chance. I told her she had all the qualities to make a wonderful local councillor. She asked how to network and whether she was past it. Ageism is alive and well in politics, especially in local politics and we are hearing about people being asked to move on and make way. We want to keep good people in politics and we want to make space for new people coming into politics and that needs to be as diverse as possible. I come from a local authority, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, that has 40 members, half of them, 20, are women and 20 are men. That is remarkable and I acknowledge how the councillors and the staff collaborate and work with one another.

I genuinely wish the witnesses well and ask them to continue with their good work. I will offer one piece of advice. Ms Gleeson was right when she stated earlier that people need to get out there. It is initially a little bit about the brand and name recognition. That is the reality. People want to vote local. They want contact with local people who are part of the community and are accessible. I wish them well in their work.

Chairman

Each of the groups might want to comment on the specific point Senator Boyhan raised about support for Independents. We have focused a lot on political parties.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

I will take both Independents and ageism. Yes, in Women For Election, as a non-partisan organisation, we work across all political parties and none in terms of encouraging women in politics. Since I came in, we have seen nearly 2,500 participants over the past two years on our screens in Zoom meetings. A number of those women are looking to run independently. In that diversity we have seen, we are seeing women from all ends of the age spectrum. We are also doing a lot of work to look at encouraging more women from the later years of life to enter into politics for the first time. We have a gendered ageism. In local politics, we have a good cohort of men in retirement who are participating, but we do not have that same career path or retirement plan for women.

There are a number of particular issues to raise regarding Independents. If an Independent candidate wants to run, he or she has to use his or her home address. Within political parties, there is the option of using party headquarters if there is a concern for safety. That is something that could be picked up on. The Senator touched on the issue of the fund. I am interested in the EnAble fund in the UK as well. Independents need to have access to cash resources as much as other people running, but they do not have the support of political parties. It is important for democracy that we are not reliant solely on the party political system and that Independents are supported, particularly where parties do not match the values of people who want to be active. I would support that. We ran bespoke programmes this year. We had sessions specifically on running an Independent campaign, where we looked at bringing in expertise on running as an Independent. That is built into our work and our mentioning programmes.

Dr. Michelle Maher

Yes. I heard what was being said about Independents. We have a lot of women who are not in political parties and are not sure if they are going to join a political party who are contemplating the Independent route. This is why it was so important that there was a guidebook for the first time with all of the practical information that was perhaps retained within political parties or political families and which is now available to everybody. It opens up the ability for women to consider running as Independents because they have all of that information in one publication.

On ageism, we only need to look at Nancy Pelosi across the sea to see that older women are well able to be part of the cut and thrust of politics. Something we would hear in our workshops was women saying they are a bit old for it. That is why we put so much of an emphasis on campaign teams, because older women, whatever their reasons, may not feel that becoming a county councillor is for them right now. What they do have is a wealth of experience and local knowledge going back over time that makes them valuable people to have on campaign teams to help women get elected. Any older woman - I would probably include myself in that now - who has survived teenagers and the menopause is well able to survive being in a county council.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

I concur with the comments already made. I thank Senator Boyhan. When I did work on women Independents who ran in the 2016 general election, it was interesting to note that there was something like a 74% increase in the number of women running as Independents. I can get the exact figure for the committee; I think it was 74%. In talking about a knock-on impact of gender quotas, obviously, they do not apply to Independents, but the fact that there were gender quotas gave this impression of the feminising of the political system, if you wish, and a space that was more welcoming of women. We saw more women coming forward as a result, given the conversation that was taking place around women in politics and the need for more women in politics. Certainly, we saw a knock-on impact. Whether it was all down to the quota, we have to dig deeper into that, but it was certainly interesting to observe that, in the first election with a gender quota, we also saw a significant increase in the number of women running as Independents. There is something there.

Senator Alice-Mary Higgins

I was not on the premises so I could not speak until now. We have covered so much, I am not going to get the witnesses to repeat things. What was mentioned about Independents is interesting, speaking as an Independent Senator within an Independent Senator group who are all women. There is something there around the signal that gets sent.

I have a specific question. I bring it up all the time because I think it is important. It is about support for people who are running. When you run, you might not win. We all know that when you run, you may have an unsuccessful first or second outing. One of the things I have always highlighted is that one of the reasons teachers run is they have a period of paid leave to run for election, regardless of whether they are successful. There is a set number of weeks - I think it is six; I am not sure - which they can take off to run. There is a reason many of the people who run are solicitors or self-employed. In many of the areas where women tend largely to be employed, they are more often likely to be employees. In many cases they are in the civil society, NGO or caring sectors, for example. In those situations, in terms of being able to say to your employer that you want to try this thing, to run, that you may or may not succeed but that you do not want to give up your job just to take that chance, will the witnesses comment on the importance of creating a culture where it is acceptable for people to run for public office and return to the role they may have had? We really saw the roll-on impact in the Seanad. The previous Seanad was nearly 30% women, but we had four or five group leaders who were women, including the Chair of this committee and me. It certainly contributed to a dynamic whereby there were many women in very clear roles in the Seanad. It did lead to a culture shift within the Seanad Chamber, which is now close to 40% women. There is a positive loop that happens in that regard when you get to a certain threshold.

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

I acknowledge, from previous advocacy roles, the benefit of having that critical mass in the Seanad and witnessing that culture shift. We are looking to achieve that critical mass in other chambers. On employment, I cannot recall - perhaps Dr. Buckley can - but I read something recently about that need for employers generally to change their attitudes towards politics. It raises a question about the wider culture in Ireland around our attitudes towards politics. For us in Women For Election, we would love to be in a country where politics is seen as a natural career or an actual active citizenship activity as much as participating in local sports or local support to the community or economy is. That shift then spins into employment. We can track it in those measures for teachers. I remember the Senator raising that with us previously.

The association of having been in politics and then employment is a very negative one. It can sometimes affect women and men when applying for jobs, that is, having had an association with politics. It is a chicken-and-egg situation, but we somehow have to get at that culture shift. The employment groups and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment have a key role. We raised it with the Minister responsible for higher education recently in terms of extending that teacher space over into the university space. Again, that is a population where there would, technically, be more downtime available. Some would argue differently. Dr. Buckley might be one. These are the ways in which we can look creatively at the situation. The Civil Service is another area where there is a bar to participation in politics. There would be a bar in many NGOs in terms of association with politics. These are the things we have to look at. It is a shift. It is not like politics is a bad thing; it is a fantastic thing. It is a critical thing for us all to be engaged with from the cradle, or maybe from preschool, right up.

Dr. Michelle Maher

One of the recommendations in, I believe, the Moorhead report on the role and remuneration of county councillors was to look at employers being compensated in some way to allow employees to leave and be absent from work to partake in their county council responsibilities.

This is another example of a lack of joined-up thinking. We have very well-researched and funded reports but the issue is to join them all up. In terms of the recommendation that employers are compensated, there is no reason that the same proviso would not apply for candidates as well. It is a reality and is one of the reasons programmes like ours prepare women years out from a local election. The reality is that three to four weeks before a local election, candidates cannot be at work and cannot meet much of their caring responsibilities either. Campaign strategies need to take account of that.

Chairman

That is very practical and important advice.

Dr. Fiona Buckley

It would be a sensible move to provide support for employees to run for office, as well for their employers to allow them to do so. That would allow for greater diversity among those running for office. We have seen in recent elections that there is a social base in our voting patterns now. We are seeing an increasing movement towards people who identify as left of centre whereas in the past, Ireland would traditionally have been seen as country where voting patters were right of centre. One could ask whether there are many working-class people represented in our political institutions. Perhaps what Senator Higgins suggests could go some way towards diversifying the pool of potential candidates that are coming forward. There is a need for more people from a working-class background to come forward and contest elections.

Chairman

That certainly gives us another perspective. I thank our guests for their responses. I thank all of our witnesses for what has been a really interesting, stimulating and wide-ranging discussion that stayed within the remit of our recommendations, particularly 20, 23 and 24. We are very grateful for that. We have heard about the need to get to 50-50 by 2030. I remember when we had an ambition to get to 50-50 by 2020. We have passed that one but let us hope we can fulfil that target by 2030. We have seen it done in other countries and it has been really positive to hear the really good experiences and practices that are going on and the positive examples of how we can achieve greater equality and diversity in our politics. I thank Ms Gleeson and Ms Reilly from Women for Election; Ms Farrell and Dr. Maher from See Her Elected; and Dr. Buckley from University College Cork. We are grateful to them all for sharing their experience and expertise. We really appreciate and value their input.

The joint committee adjourned at 11.43 a.m. until 9.15.a.m. on Thursday, 20 October 2022.

Joint Committee on Gender Equality debate - Thursday, 13 Oct 2022

Recommendations of the Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality: Discussion (Resumed)

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Ms Tara Farrell

Dr. Michelle Maher

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Ms Tara Farrell

Dr. Michelle Maher

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Dr. Michelle Maher

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Ms Tara Farrell

Dr. Michelle Maher

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Ms Megan Reilly

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Dr. Michelle Maher

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Ms Megan Reilly

Dr. Michelle Maher

Ms Tara Farrell

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Dr. Michelle Maher

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Ms Caitríona Gleeson

Dr. Michelle Maher

Dr. Fiona Buckley

Joint Committee on Gender Equality debate -
Thursday, 13 Oct 2022