Women candidate quota legislation could be forced on parties

Political parties could be forced by law to have a minimum number of women candidates in elections if the threat of having their state funding cut does not work, warned Minister Pat Rabbitte.

So far only Sinn Féin and the anti-austerity parties have 30% women candidates for the coming local election, according to the Women For Election group tracking the numbers.

Mr Rabbitte said that perhaps the quota system could also be applied to local elections, but they would wait to see how the numbers stacked up for the May vote.

Parties that do not field a minimum 30% of women candidates will lose half of their state funding under legislation introduced last year, but there was no similar targets set for local authorities.

There will be about 1,500 contesting the 949 seats in the local elections and by the end of last week there were just 359 women selected. Niamh Gallagher, co-founder of Women For Election, said they hoped this would increase to at least 500 or a third of the total.

At present, just 16% of local politicians are women — slightly more than the 15.7% at national level.

There was a lot of work for them to do given that after the next three elections, they must field at least 40% female candidates. Ireland is in 88th out of 188 countries globally and third last, just ahead of Romania and Hungary, in the EU for female representation.

As a not-for-profit organisation that is holding courses and seminars to encourage and train women would-be politicians, she said that for the first time the number of women was becoming an election issue. A look at the table of how many women candidates they had would influence a woman’s choice on which party best to join.

As of the end of February the percentage of female candidates were: FF 17.8%; FG 21.4%; Greens 26.4%; Labour 29.7%; SF 30.2%; Anti-Austerity 33.3%; People Before Profit 40.9%; Independents 20%; others 17.9%.