Discussing a recent ESRI report on NewstalkFM radio on 13 December, Nicola Byrne, founder & CEO of 11890 had this exchange with Jonathan Healy
Jonathan: … Funny you mention politics, because that’s the one area where there has been absolutely no change. We seem to have had very few new female politicians coming through. There have been some, and some of them have gone on, but, if you look at the Cabinet, it’s mostly an “old boys” affair.
Nicola: Well we have seen a lot of changes. I know we have only 14% women I think currently in the Dail, and I have one or two of them as friends, but the difficulty there is that the system in the Dail hasn’t changed. We haven’t had enough power & influence, and it’s been left deliberately that way, that it isn’t family-friendly.
The Dail goes on until 10 o’clock at night sometimes. If you’re a young mother, you can’t participate. We’ve lost one or two TDs to the fact that two working TDs when they got married, she had to cut her job because she just couldn’t put the hours in. So we haven’t built the system for equality. We’ve actually just built the system to suit whoever was in power at the time. ‘He who has the power is the king-maker’. And so the Dail has remained a traditional male bastion for that reason. It’s not some great mystery why it hasn’t happened. The boys just suited themselves, and nobody stopped them.
Jonathan (laughing): I think they do that across the board in relation to gender issues…
