February 11, 2020
Here is the excerpt from the blog:
This past Saturday, February 8th, while the Iowa Democratic Party was continuing to calculate who won the primary election, the Irish voters went to the polls for their general election. While coalition government has yet to be decided, some key election takeaways are clear, the Sinn Féin is poised to come out of the election with the most votes of any party and 37 seats in the Dáil second only to the Fianna Fáil, and the number of seats held by women only rose by three, bringing the total number of women up to 36.
Between 1992 and 2011, the number of women Teachtaí Dála (TDs) only increased by two percent. This extreme stagnation led to the implementation of enforced gender quotas for party’s fielding candidates in the general election. A 30 percent gender quota was put in place for the 2016 election, if a party failed to meet the quota they lost 50 percent of their state funding. The 30 percent quota remained for this past election but will rise to 40 percent for the 2023 election season. Although this year marks the first time in Irish history there is at least one woman candidate in all 39 constituencies, the total number of women candidates only rose by two from 2016, bringing to total up to 162, and the largest parties have just barely scraped the 30 percent quota.
The Social Democratic Party, co-led by Roisin Shorthall and Catherine Murphy is the only party to reach and surpass gender parity, with 55 percent of their fielded candidates being women, the Green Party follows on their heels with women making up 41 percent, Solidarity-People Before Profit Party with 38 percent, and Sinn Féin led by Mary Lou McDonald with 33 percent.
Read the full blog here.