TIME TO ACCELERATE WOMEN’S CLIMB TO POLITICAL TOP TABLE

TODAY Irish women join their sisters across the globe to mark International Women’s Day. It is a significant date in the calendar because it affords an opportunity for everyone – male and female of all ages and backgrounds – to reflect upon the position and role of half the globe’s population.

For women generally, and especially those who have taken a role in advancing women’s rights, it is an opportunity to examine how far things have come, and what remains to be achieved.

Any assessment of the human experience – past, present and future – will reveal women’s role has been under-appreciated as the female sex has been alternatively excluded from power and influence in our daily lives, or only grudgingly admitted on an occasional basis to the mainstream.

Happily, new assessments of Irish history, especially in this decade of centenary commemorations, are shedding light upon the great contribution of women to Ireland’s independence struggle and the many social and cultural movements which were aligned to that struggle. Appropriately, access to this new knowledge is being led by women historians and women in similar fields of study.

Some boorish males may downplay, or dismiss outright, the significance of this day of celebration and reflection on women in day-to-day life.

Allegations of ‘faddism’ and ‘tokenism’ must be dismissed out of hand as timewasting bigotry. This date has been a focal point in the struggle for women’s rights since the turn of the 20th century and its adoption by the United Nations in 1977 anchored it firmly in the mainstream.

Ireland was among the first to return a woman member of parliament in Countess Markievicz back in December 1918. Markievicz became Ireland’s first government minister when an independent breakaway parliament and administration were established in 1919. But we had to wait 60 years for a second woman in cabinet when Máire Geoghegan Quinn was appointed in 1979.

That story of under-representation by women in our politics remains with us. In the Dáil, elected in February 2020, fewer than one in four TDs are women and that is a marked improvement on previous ratios.

In the entire history of this State, we have had four women tánaistí in Mary Harney, Mary Coughlan, Joan Burton and Frances Fitzgerald. And while we have two distinguished presidents in Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, we are still waiting on our first woman Taoiseach almost 100 years after the State’s foundation.

We are currently below the EU average of 30pc for female parliamentarians and far behind the Nordic average of 41pc. An ironic reflection in a United Nations’ report notes that just 22 of the world’s current heads of state and government are women, and at existing rates of change equality of the sexes in this regard would take 130 years.

So, International Women’s Day is clearly a celebration of progress and a stocktake of women’s current position. But more importantly, it is time to acknowledge the pace of change on the path to equality must urgently be speeded up.

Still awaiting first woman Taoiseach almost century after State’s foundation