Put More Women in the Dáil
The National Women's Council welcomes this initiative by Claiming our Future, in which we are involved, and we urge all of our members and supporters to sign the petition and email their Labour TDs at once.
Update to the campaign: Tell your Labour TDs now
This is a critical moment in our campaign to ensure that more women are elected to the Dail.
We now know what happens when only one candidate in six is a woman - we get a new Dail in which only one TD in six is a woman.
That's pretty clear evidence that if we want a Dail that better reflects all the talents of our society, we need to ensure that in the next election more women can put their names forward as candidates.
A lot of things are needed to make that happen. Some have characterised the changes we need as " the five C's" : Childcare, Cash, Confidence, Culture and Candidate selection procedures.
Claiming our Future has made a specific proposal which will help address some of these problems, and encourage the political system to address the others. We have proposed that the funding that political parties receive from the taxpayer should be reduced if parties fail to nominate a broadly equal number of male and female candidates.
A few parties, including Labour adopted this proposal in their election manifestos. What we will discover this week is whether Labour seeks to get this proposal adopted in the Programme for Government, and whether they succeed.
To help them make up their minds we are asking everyone who has signed the petition to do two things:
First we are asking you to e-mail your newly elected Labour TDs to tell them that this manifesto commitment is important to you, and you want it acted on. You can do that by clicking here.
Second, we need you to tell as many of your friends as possible about the petition and this campaign. You can do that by clicking the 'e-mail' button on the campaign web-site. and cutting and pasting this text into the section marked 'note'.
Claiming our Future has launched a petition to put more women into the Dáil.
The National Women's Council welcomes this initiative by Claiming our Future, in which we are involved, and we urge all of our members and supporters to sign the petition.
To sign the petition, go to www.claimingourfuture.ie.
From the Claiming our Future press release:
Claiming Our Future Alliance Warns Political Parties to Take Action to Ensure More Women Candidates in Future Elections as Fewer than 1 in 6 Running for Election are Female
- Group calls for next Govt to slash some of the annual €13 Million funding to political parties if they fail to increase number of women candidates running in next Elections.
The Claiming Our Future movement has said that with women making up fewer than 1 in 6 of the candidates in the current election it is vital that all political parties run more women candidates in future elections.
The group has called for measures to be put in place so that if the parties fail to run more women candidates they will lose some of the €13 million per year funding that the parties currently receive from the tax payer.
The Claiming our Future movement is a broad alliance for political, social and economic reform that has achieving political reform as one of the key elements of its programme to build a more equal, sustainable and prosperous Ireland.
The movement was launched at a highly successful event of over 1,000 people in the RDS last autumn. Within that broad objective of political reform, Claiming Our Future has identified equal political representation between men and women as one of the primary tasks.
Claiming our Future has launched an on-line petition at www.claimingfuture.ie and plans to hand in the signatures during the negotiation of the new programme for government.
"During the election campaign, our political leaders are full of promises for political reform, but the most basic reform - that our elected representatives should reflect the broad diversity of the people - is being ignored."
"It is too late to do anything about this gender inequality for this election as the candidates have already been chosen. However, unless we start to act now we will very soon find that it is too late for the next election too."
"Claiming our Future plans to mobilize public opinion to tell the leaders of the incoming Government that we want to see concrete action to address this inequality in our national parliament - and we want to see results before they come looking for our vote again."
"We recognise that each voter has the right to cast their vote as they wish - but can they really exercise that right when political parties nominate so few women. The new Dail is likely to have fewer women TDs than the current Dail, and we are already 23rd out of 27 EU countries for the representation of women in parliament."
According to the Standards in Public Office Commission, the political parties have received almost €55 million of public money in order to run their affairs since the last election. This is in addition to the salaries of TDs, their advisors and secretaries in the Dáil. One of the specified purposes for this substantial public funding is to 'promote women in politics'.
It is not acceptable that political parties should continue to receive our money while systematically failing to represent half of the population.
To sign the petition, go to www.claimingourfuture.ie.