Jimmy Stynes was a great footballer. He was one of the first sportsmen in Ireland to go to Australia and play Australian rules football. He is the late Jimmy Stynes, I regret to say. He was a neighbour of mine. My claim to fame is that I played a bit of football with him when I was a juvenile. Why am I mentioning him? When I was seven, eight or nine, his mum had a company car. She worked for a company and it was unheard of for a woman to have that kind of position when I was young and to have a company car. It was exceptional. I just came from a meeting this morning with Dervla McKay, who is managing director of Go-Ahead. It would not have been countenanced or envisaged 30 or 40 years ago. I say that to explain the progress that has been made by women. It is clearly not enough. Mrs. Stynes, the late Jimmy's mother, always stood out in my head as being remarkable in our locality, where there were many sales representatives who had company cars, but she was alone among women.
I come from a family where I had three brothers and three sisters. My mother earned more than my father, which was quite unusual at the time. She was a working woman. She was a teacher and she became a principal teacher. My father was a milkman with Premier Dairies and he did a lot of the caring roles, the school runs, the lunches and all of that kind of stuff. I grew up in a house where there were strong women, where equality was just absorbed as a process of osmosis, and the notion that women should be thwarted in any shape or form would have been alien to me. The notion that women were equal, that my sisters were equal and that my mother was an exceptionally hardworking woman who imparted a capacity for hard work among all of us was a key part of the genetic make-up.
The constituents I meet, particularly about special needs education and disability, are very often women, who are in those advocacy and representative roles, fighting the corner, fighting for additional needs and for additional resources for their children and loved ones. It is not lost on me as a public representative that it is predominantly women who fight that fight. There are still dinosaurs around. During the general election, I knocked on a door. A young woman answered the door and we were chatting away. Her partner came out and was clearly very unhappy that she was engaging with anybody at the door. He said, "That is great, thank you" and shut the door. I went away wondering how that particular episode continued and ended. I suspect it was physical and violent. It was the impression I was left with.
A number of advances have been made. Deputy Ward mentioned Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. I was a member of South Dublin County Council for 16 years. I promoted women, including those who were co-opted in my place, and was successful in recruiting women who had never been members of Fianna Fáil who went on to contest elections for Fianna Fáil and were elected for Fianna Fáil. We made a contribution to South Dublin County Council in that it is now the only local authority in the country which has a majority of women in the council chamber. That is quite an advance and one I am proud of.
One of the issues that came to me as a politician recently, which I raised with the Minister for Social Protection and his predecessor, is the means testing of certain allowances. There are still dinosaurs of men who withhold money from their spouses and control the finances in the house, so the notion that a woman has no pension entitlement of her own and therefore is utterly reliant on her spouse for any form of income or support is something that we need to look at.
In public service, I notice that 50% of our ambassadors are women. I am a regular annual visitor to the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, although it is no longer BT. I thank BT for its service to young scientists in Ireland.
There have been more girls than boys participating in recent years. I think of Ashlee Keogh and Aimee Keogh from Tallaght Community School in my constituency. It is their third year and they won a prize this year. I think of how girls participating in STEM subjects were well behind boys a decade ago but they are catching up. That is not by accident but because of Government policy and Government investment in women, in particular young women.
I have a lot more to say, particularly on women's health and the advances made there, but I have run out of time. I thank the Chair for his forbearance.
