On the face of it, women have today made a lot of progress in Irish political life. We have a woman President, a woman Tanaiste, three women Ministers. One party leader and two deputy leaders are women. But Dail Eireann, as this book reminds us, remains predominantly a male club, where seven out of eight TDs are men. Spain, New Zealand and Australia have double our share of women in parliament: Scandinavia and the Netherlands three times our level.
Research by Trinity's Policy Studies Institute for this book examines why women's participation remains persistently low. The most electorally successful candidates are male incumbents - the least successful are women challengers. Getting on the ticket is the first hurdle, getting elected is the second, and all for a career notoriously difficult to combine with family life given its hours of work and, for rural TDs, the days away from home. I had a large picture of my family on my office wall, and there were days when it was the only glimpse of them I got.
Traditionally, women were most likely to be elected when family duty and political ambition coincided. Today, the political daughter and sister have taken over from the political widow as inheritors of family seats, but unlike earlier times a majority of women in the Dail today made their way there independent of a family connection.
Because it is harder for new women to get elected, increasing the number of women TDs in the Dail will not be easy unless this is prioritised by the parties. The book argues that to bring women's representation up to 20 per cent, the number of new women TDs per election would need to double. Indeed, without a significant increase in new women TDs, the current age profile suggests the proportion of women in the Dail might actually fall.
The second half of the book is a directory of all the women who served in the Dail and Seanad or as MEPs. This part of this book contains some fascinating portraits of the lives of early women politicians, including many now forgotten. Three Countesses - Countess Markievicz (occupation "Revolutionary"), Ellen Desart, and Lady Wicklow served in the Oireachtas. Helena Concannon was one of the few voices against the role assigned to women by de Valera's Constitution. Dr Kathleen Lynn and Dr Ada English were pioneers in hospital care as well as in politics.
While the early women are very well researched, more recent women members, and particularly the 1997 intake, get more sketchy treatment. There are some disappointingly one-line entries for people like Anne Colley, Roisin Shortall, Senator Tras Honan and Senator Mary Kelly, all of whom have made substantial political contributions. The book has some wonderfully selected quotes from Oireachtas debates to enliven the picture of women's political contribution and the context in which they made it. All in all, an excellent gift for the feminist Christmas stocking.
Eithne Fitzgerald, former Minister of State, is Labour's candidate for Dublin South. In 1992, she received the most votes ever cast for a woman in an Irish election