Ireland is low in the league table of numbers of women politicians, but is a quota system the right answer to unequal representation?
WHAT DOES Ireland have in common with Turkey, Malta, Romania and Hungary? Like those four countries, Ireland is at the bottom end of the European table for women representatives in parliament. With only 23 female Dáil deputies out of 166, we are lagging well behind such countries as Sweden, the Netherlands and Iceland, where more than 40 per cent of parliament members are women.
When Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first woman president in 1990, it seemed that the gender imbalance here would begin to be addressed, but 19 years later Ireland seems far from making that cultural and political leap. In both the last general election in 2007 and the June local elections for city and county councils, 17 per cent of the candidates were women. Some 470 people contested the general election, 81 of them women, of whom 22 were elected. It appears that once a woman gets on the ticket, she stands as good a chance of being elected as a man (with the notable exception of Co Wicklow, where only one woman was elected out of the nine who went forward for the county council).
The critical mass of 30 per cent of women in politics seems a very long way off. And while women deputies say they have not encountered sexism in the Dáil, its structures and procedures are geared towards a male mode of working. There may even be a certain sexism in the small things, such as the seemingly benign nickname of “Mammy” imposed on veteran politician and former Fianna Fáil minister Mary O’Rourke TD. And the appearance of women deputies is more open to scrutiny than that of their male counterparts.
So why do so few women manage to break into politics in Ireland? And is it time Ireland introduced a mandatory quota system, used successfully in countries such as Spain and Belgium, to ensure women are better represented in the Dáil? In an attempt to examine the gender imbalance, the Government has set up the Joint Sub-committee on Women’s Participation in Politics, which is expected to report and make recommendations by the end of October. It is chaired by Fianna Fáil TD Brendan Kenneally, with Independent Senator Ivana Bacik as rapporteur. It will try to identify the obstacles to participation which have prevented the number of women in the Dáil ever rising above 14 per cent, and it will examine ways to encourage women into politics, including positive discrimination. The sub-committee will also look at the candidate selection processes of the political parties and examine how “the sticky floor” works against women coming through them.
At its first public meeting, the sub-committee heard the insights of two former ministers for education, the Labour Party’s Niamh Bhreathnach and Fine Gael’s Gemma Hussey, as well as former Progressive Democrat minister of state Liz O’Donnell. Bhreathnach said Labour had identified the obstacles to women’s participation in politics as “the six Cs”: cash, connections, culture, children, confidence and career. What was common in countries well represented by women was good childcare policies, she said. Hussey, who was elected to the Dáil for the first time in 1982, said the Irish legacy of control over women by church and State has still not been shaken off.
“People like me . . . going back to the time I went into government, were in such small numbers that we did not have the critical mass to change the nature and style of politics, which is what needs to be done,” she said.
“There are many women in society who are active in their own professions,” said O’Donnell, “yet the breakthrough has not come about in terms of equality of participation for women in politics.”
She added that politics was “tailor-made for men . . . It is a difficult terrain for women, particularly women with small children . . . Concessions and allowances should be made for the divided loyalties of younger women politicians who are mothers of small children.” Many women also lacked the necessary finance or networks, she said. All three politicians agreed that the biggest obstacle facing women was “the bear pit” of the selection convention, and felt that party quotas could be the way forward.
The sub-committee’s second public meeting, on Wednesday, will hear the views of Prof Yvonne Galligan, director of the Centre for the Advancement of Women in Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. “Quotas manage to overcome the cultural resistance to gender equality,” Galligan says. In Spain and Belgium, where women’s representation was as low as Ireland’s 10 years ago, quotas have ensured that women’s parliamentary representation is now approaching 40 per cent.
Galligan admits that the quota response doesn’t address many of the blocks that prevent women entering politics, including the six Cs. But quotas do target the wider bias within parties and society.
“If we agree that women are equally talented and have equal resources, the stumbling blocks are at selection stage,” she says. “And quotas address that.”
IN FRANCE, although quotas have improved gender equality to an extent, they haven't worked as well as elsewhere. The legislation introduced there through constitutional amendment required parties to field equal numbers of men and women for election. It also included financial penalties for parties that failed to put forward a sufficient number of women. Although the system worked well at local level, at national level some parties chose to pay the penalty rather than choose women, while others ran women in constituencies where they were unlikely to take seats. As a result, only 18 per cent of the parliament is made up of women.
In Sweden, which is top of the equality tables in Europe (with female parliamentary representation of 48 per cent), the quotas are voluntary. In Finland and Denmark, which also have high levels of women’s representation, there are no quotas. So how do they ensure that women are well-represented in parliament?
“Their culture recognises it is important for democratic decision-making to have women and men there in good numbers,” Galligan says.
In the absence of such a culture, quotas seem the obvious solution. Galligan argues that they are not about discrimination, but are “temporary mechanisms in place to address an historical injustice”. Ireland’s two major parties would not have to look far for talented women, she says, and it is essential for democracy that they do so. The low representation of women in politics means that the experience and knowledge of women in society is not translated into policy,” she adds.
Mary O’Rourke recognises that there is a “mindset” within Fianna Fáil which resulted in too few women being selected for the local elections in June, but she does not accept that an enforced quota would improve things.
“I never was and never will be in favour of quotas,” she says. “You just have to have women who are determined.”
As for her “Mammy” nickname, she admits that at first she was puzzled by it, because she was not the only woman with children in the Dáil. “I talk about my family and I guess it is that got me the name,” she says. “They invented the term as derogatory, but I cut the ground from under them because I tell them everyone loves their mammy.”
