(Bloomberg) — Ireland’s parliament is the worst for gender diversity in western Europe, even after boosting its quota rules for its recent general election, a setback for a country that has become the poster child for achieving rapid social progress in recent decades.
Out of 174 seats in the national vote held on Nov. 29, 44 have been filled by women — or just over 25%. Even though the picture is not much brighter elsewhere, its less than the 32% average across European parliaments, and starkly below the 37% for the western European average, an analysis by Bloomberg of Inter-Parliamentary Union data show. It is at the bottom of the rankings for western Europe.
No European nation has reached the 50% gender parity mark yet, although Iceland is the closest, with women currently holding 48% of seats in its national parliament. Some of the European nations with the lowest proportion include Hungary, at 15%, and Romania, at 19%, according to the IPU’s global rankings.
The numbers are disappointing for Ireland, a state that largely shrugged off the traditional influence of the Catholic church as it encountered a burst of economic growth in the 1990s known as the Celtic Tiger. That raised incomes, reduced poverty and was a period of social progress. Today, Ireland is one of Europe’s wealthiest nations, boasting one of the continent’s only budget surpluses thanks to the outsized number of multinationals based there.
But that progress doesn’t appear to have helped meaningfully improve the numbers of women winning public office in the longer term and in fact has reversed some progress it made. Ireland had some of the highest female political representation in the 1990s, even electing its first female president, Mary Robinson, in 1990. But in the early noughties it began to fall behind the rest of Europe, the data show.
As other European nations began to take affirmative action on women in politics at that juncture, Ireland stalled, only starting to have serious conversations about political life after the 2008 crash when attention shifted to reform, according to senior University College Cork lecturer Fiona Buckley.
Belgium introduced legislation to increase female electoral participation in 1994, for example, through a law that rendered electoral lists with more than two-thirds of candidates of the same sex illegal, according to a European Parliament document. Meanwhile, Ireland turned to legislation much later, in 2012, when it introduced a binding 30% quota for political parties running candidates for national elections.
“There’s a paradox with regards to the progress that we have made,” newly elected Labour parliamentarian Marie Sherlock said, pointing to a gender recognition bill that was introduced in 2015, which she says might not be passed if it was to be introduced now. “There is an element of the culture wars being played out in other countries, less so perhaps in Ireland. But certainly we very much feel it.”
Irish referendums held in March to change outdated language on women and the family in the constitution were defeated, a surprise setback, considering Ireland legalized same-sex marriage in 2016, and repealed the 8th amendment on abortion in 2018. The government admitted at the time it had failed to convince citizens the vote was necessary for social progress.
The path for many to enter Ireland’s national parliament is through local politics but it is one that is considered “to be the preserve of those with the advantages of the lowest care load,” according to the National Women’s Council of Ireland, a leading civil society group.
This is something Sherlock experienced in her own path to national politics. “I was pregnant with my third child when I first ran for the local elections in 2019. And certainly, it is an enormous balancing act,” she said in an interview. “The notion of having to do two jobs — being a part-time councilor and do your job — is very difficult.”
The picture is improving slightly. The quota was bumped to 40% for Ireland’s most recent election, translating into the country’s highest proportion of women in the parliament, known as the Dail, ever, with an additional seven female members of parliament from the last election in 2020. The National Women’s Council has called for the rule to apply to local elections too, which could help lower the barrier to local politics which Sherlock said is so crucial.
“What the quota has achieved in nearly 14 years and three electoral cycles, is that previously, it took 10 electoral cycles and 37 years to achieve that advancement,” Buckley said. “So the candidate selection is somewhat being addressed by the gender quota legislation, but there’s still a bit of work to do there.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-05 21:38:00
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