Sir, – In the run-up to the Dáil summer recess, the gender quotas Bill passed both houses of the Oireachtas with little fanfare, in the guise of a bill on the public funding of political parties (Home News, July 20th). The fact that a law of such importance to the functioning of our electoral system and of questionable constitutionality passed with little proper debate in the Dáil, or in the public arena more generally is very worrying.
With passage of this Bill, sexual discrimination by the State shall be enshrined as the law of the land. Political parties that fail to select more than 30 per cent female candidates will have their public funding halved. In the last general election, 15 per cent of candidates were female, and precisely the same percentage of elected TDs were female.
Political parties selected between 15 per cent and 26 per cent female candidates, while only 9 per cent of Independents were female. This indicates that the electorate is not influenced by gender when choosing a candidate to vote for, and it appears that political parties already select female candidates at a higher rate than the rate at which they stand as Independents. Whatever the reason for the low level of participation of women in politics, discrimination on behalf of the electorate or political parties is not supported by an objective reading of the statistics.
Imposing quotas to achieve an arbitrary desired result is unjust, almost certainly unconstitutional and is demeaning to women, by suggesting that the only way that women can succeed in politics is by receiving preferential treatment.
While the gender quotas issue is important, the public funding of political parties is an issue that has received even less scrutiny and has the potential to be much more corrupting of our political system.
The legislation entails funding political parties from the public purse based on results from the previous election. This amounts to a State subsidy for incumbents and is clearly discriminatory against new political parties, Independent candidates and existing parties without current Dáil representation.
The precedent set by the McKenna judgment is that the State cannot preferentially fund one side of a referendum campaign, and it would seem obvious that this proposed system of campaign funding is similarly vulnerable to constitutional challenge. Corporate financing has correctly been identified as a potential corrupting influence on politics, but replacing it with a system of State funding that subsidises some candidates and not others, and can withhold funding from some candidates if they are the wrong gender, is not an improvement.
A simpler alternative, along the lines of the McCain-Feingold act in the US, is to ban corporate donations, put upper limits on individual contributions, and insist that all donations are made public. This Government was elected with many promises for governmental and constitutional reforms, but their actions on issues such as Oireachtas inquiries, Seanad reform, campaign financing and constitutional reform have been ill-considered and have been given insufficient public scrutiny. Bad reforms are not better than no reform at all. – Yours, etc,