Female contribution vital, says O’Rourke
She also described the Dáil sitting times — considered to be a barrier to parents staying in politics — as “ridiculous” and said “they should sit from 9 o’clock until 6 o’clock like an office”.
In a discussion called ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling’ Ms O’Rourke spoke to party delegates about a Fianna Fáil women’s group set up by Charlie Haughey in 1983.
“People would flock in,” as they held meetings around the country. “It became a thing, you couldn’t miss a Saturday Fianna Fáil women’s outing,” she said. “I always felt that part of the success of the ’87 general election was due to that women’s grouping.”
Encouraging the party to set up a similar group, Ms O’Rourke said: “There was a need then for that sort of reawakening and there is a distinct need now for that sort of reawakening in a more modern context, so that women — young and old and in-between — will come and give their views.”
Under the Electoral Amendment Political Funding Act passed by the Oireachtas last year, parties will lose State funding if less than 30% of their candidates are female in the next general elections. This will rise to 40% in subsequent elections.
The four biggest parties have committed to voluntarily operate gender quotas in the 2014 local elections. Fianna Fáil supported the introduction of quotas, but Ms O’Rourke is against them.
“Who’d want to be a gender quota?” she said. “You like to have got there by yourself, by your own competence and ability.”
Ms O’Rourke added that “words like gender equality and gender quotas are not good words. They have discriminatory connotations where as what we want is a mixture of men and women, a better reflection of society.”
Although she said it was harder for her to get nominated to contest a seat because she was a woman, when she eventually entered the Dáil, she felt she got there the same way as everybody else.
“Nobody could lord above anyone else because they all had the same path to get in there,” she said.
Her advice to women was that they have to be more assertive, and to know their facts and be prepared for every meeting, because “if a fella makes a mistake everyone is prepared to say ‘ah sure what harm’ but if a woman makes a mistake they talk about it”.
“Every woman going for politics needs a partner — woman or man, it doesn’t matter — who believes utterly in them, who is prepared to say ‘You are right, I believe in you, I love you’,” said Ms O’Rourke.
“I don’t think any of the young women need mentoring now, I think they know it all, but if there is any advice I can give, any help I can provide, I would be very glad to dispense it and to talk about it.”
Ms O’Rourke said there was a “new era” for women in Fianna Fáil and told them to “grasp that and move forward to it”.
