Welcome For 30% Female Minimum In Parties

Labour's Women division have welcomed the introduction of a new bill that will halve the funding to political parties if they fail to run minimum of 30% candidates of either gender.

The party said the legislation would address the gender imbalance, which they claimed had been persistent in Irish politics.

"While it will probably take a couple of electoral cycles before the much improved outcomes will be seen, by then we should have a situation where women candidates are firmly part and parcel of how the political parties do business," said Katherine Dunne Labour Women Chair.

The party said 21 constituencies had no woman TDs while men still hold 85% of all the seats in Dáil Éireann. It added that currently six countries in the EU also have this type of legislation and while the remaining 20 EU countries, some did not require any legislative measures as they already had a high number of women in their parliaments such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany.

Meanwhile, for the bottom performers such as Malta, Hungary, Cyprus or Romania, Labour Women said some measures such as this would be useful.

'"This measure will increase the choice of voters who have been deprived of the option of voting for a woman candidate from the major parties.," Ms Dunne said.

She added: "Labour Women are particularly pleased that all parties appear to support this measure. While we do know that some people have reservations about this piece of legislation, the time to debate has passed and we now have to move to a place where we simply get on with it.

"A positive attitude will be much more helpful. We should all embrace this measure and consider it the progressive measure that it is."

(DW)