Bacik will be welcomed by women of all parties

LIBERAL, highly educated and with an appetite for social reform, Ivana Bacik is not everyone’s cup of tea but her election to the Dáil after more than three decades in public life is significant. Firstly, as the only female TD in a fourseater constituency, her arrival strikes a blow for gender balance. That her constituency of Dublin Bay South, which is nothing if not affluent and socially progressive, returned an all-male line up in the last general election, despite highprofile Kate O’Connell’s name on the ballot paper and historically boasting such prominent figures as Lucinda Creighton and Frances Fitzgerald, shows how deep rooted the problem of gender representation is in politics.

In an ideal world this should not matter too much, apart from the deformed picture that an all-male Dáil would create of a society where 51% of the population is female.

All votes being equal, a politician should be committed to their constituents’ intertims ests regardless of gender and if female voters felt they were still being discriminated against, they could always turf the offender out.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, far from it, and there are crucial issues relating to everything from domestic violence to equal pay to children’s rights that fly under the radar of male politicians.

Bacik’s election is important as she is an articulate champion of equality with a track record in the Senate of raising issues like equal pay and standing up for the underdog.

LIKE Josepha Madigan, who revealed in the Dáil that she was a victim of sexual assault, or Senator Catherine Ardagh, who by highlighting her own story of IVF treatments called on the Government to fund IVF for infertile couples, Bacik appreciates how individual politicians can leverage their experiences to propel issues into the public domain, issues that most male colleagues might be blissfully unaware of or too embarrassed to raise.

Madigan struck a good balance in her speech between personal revelation and calling for legislative change. The Dublin-Rathdown TD said she always takes statistics with a ‘pinch of salt’ as most vic

do not report their crimes.

‘There are many reasons for this,’ she added. ‘Shame, the fear of judgement and a desire to forget are among the reasons.’ Perhaps she was too tactful to add that the harsh experience of having your 999 calls not dealt with by the gardaí, as the gardaí in fairness themselves revealed, may also be a factor.

The cancellation of emergency calls is alarming as it shows that despite the reforming zeal of Justice Minister Helen McEntee to tackle domestic violence in all its forms, there is still a mountain to climb in terms of protecting families and treating culprits.

But there are other areas of public life where the relative invisibility of women has resulted in policy gaps. During the darkest days of the pandemic,

shoe shops were allowed to open by appointment to sell to children when it emerged that parents were struggling to order properly fitting shoes online for their children.

EXPERTS blamed the situation on a lack of females among the NPHET decisionmakers and particularly the Covid-19 Cabinet subcommittee that set the regulations. Men, for all their good intentions, don’t ‘get’ the fear that afflicts women over safety, the demands of child-rearing or the ‘unconscious bias’ in the workplace. As Josepha Madigan said, the political views of female TDs may differ drastically, but they all share a common purpose. They are ‘very much part of the unfinished democracy that is Ireland when it comes to the representation and treatment of women’. And as such they will stretch their arms across party lines to give a céad míle fáilte to Ivana Bacik.