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An extract from the address made by Trudy Brockie in Galway on the eve of International Women’s Day, giving the background to the formation of the 50:50 Group
Good eveninng and thank you to the Global Women’s Studies Programme for inviting me here as part of events to mark the 100th anniversary of Women’s Day. May I also say how honoured I am to be sharing a platform with women who have gone ahead and put themselves forward as candidates for election: it is something to be celebrated and cherished. You are among the select few: there were just 86 of you contesting the recent general election out of a total of 560 candidates. There is work to be done.
And that’s essentially what 50:50 is about. We aspire to have an Oireachtas where being male or female becomes largely irrelevant, where women, as well as men can just get on with the business of governing the country . It just rolls off the tongue, put like that , doesn’t it, but we all of us know that there are significant social and cultural barriers to women’s full participation in our democratic institutions. Our stated aim is to have a 50:50 ratio of women to men by 2020.
Firstly some background on how we came to this position.
Irishwomen -those over 30- were first granted the right to vote in 1918. Then on 1st April 1919, Countess Markievicz was appointed Minister for Labour. Thus right from the foundation of the State, gender of itself was no barrier, in legal terms, to acceding to political office. The next time a woman was appointed minister was in… 1979! (This was Maire Geoghan-Quinn ). If a female presence at cabinet was totally absent in those years, in the Dail chambers it was little better with the numbers of women TDs being generally in single figures and low single figures at that. That these were often relatives of male TDs seemed the way things were.The seventies saw a breakthrough in ending some of the gendered discrimination in Irish society and this began to be reflected in political representation. In the 1977 general election, first preference votes for women candidates almost doubled. (only 6 returned…) The milestones happened in the nineties with the election of the first woman president and then in 1992 numbers of women TDs breached the 20s . In the last Dail there were 23 women, in the brand new one, this has increased to 25. We have made some progress: instead of being 86th in world rankings, we have gone up to 79th. Is this good enough? Those of us in the 50:50 group think not. Why is there such a divergence between the Registers of Births and Deaths where females to males are roughly equal and the genders of those elected to represent us in Dail Eireann? In other areas of life where gender was a determining factor of access up to recently, male and females work side by side. Clearly, there is something going on in the selection and election of candidates to the Dail which needs to be addressed.
The 50:50 group was formed after a conference which was jointly organized by the Department of Government and Politics and the Department of Women’s Studies in UCC. The conference, which took place in September 2010, was entitled : “Moving in from the Margins: Women’s Political Representation in Ireland”
It examined the question of gender in relation to political representation and in particular the report, published in 2009 of the Oireachtas sub committee on Women and Politics. This is a substantial report which examined in detail the gender imbalance in the Houses of the Oireachtas, and came up with concrete recommendations. As part of its research, it looked at how other countries had dealt with similar situations (For example Ireland and Belgium were broadly similar in their percentages of women in parliament in 1995 -about 12% . By 2010 Belgium had increased this to 35% while we were little better at 13%). Some of us who attended the Sept conference decided that it was time to carry this further…