Green Party Fermanagh South Tyrone

Thank you for inviting me this evening, thank you even more for coming to Enniskillen and thank you most of all for producing this fantastic manifesto.  Like my Green Party colleague Clare Bailey in South Belfast, I can endorse it fully.

Green politics is feminist politics.  It couldn’t be otherwise.   Every one of our principles: social justice, environmental sustainability, non-violence and grassroots democracy depends on the active and full participation of women.  If they don’t include women, they don’t work.

Green Party policies are the active outworking of those four principles.  Those policies make women’s lives better in all the areas that this manifesto covers: economic justice, social justice, culture and equality.  But they have to not only be for women, but also drawn up by women and implemented through women’s representation.

As your report says boldly, ‘the under-representation of women in politics in Northern Ireland is a serious issue which must be addressed as a matter of urgency’.  Even right now in this election, the proportion of women candidates in many parties and in many constituencies is absolutely woeful.  Drawbridge feminism, the Mrs Thatcher model, where you have one woman at the top and the portcullis comes down on all the rest, isn’t feminism at all.

In the Green Party we’ve acknowledged and addressed that issue.  We’ve worked hard to support women within the party, to address the many causes of under-representation, to listen and to learn.  I’ve been a beneficiary of and a participant in that process, and I’m delighted to be one of the nine women standing in this election for the Green Party, along with nine men beside us.  That fifty per cent means a great deal to us, we’re very proud of it, but we’re equally proud of how naturally it came about.  If you work seriously at making the conditions right, outstanding women candidates will arise, and will get elected.  Watch South Belfast.

But it’s not just about representation in party politics.  Since the Good Friday Agreement, the number of women in public life in general has gone down.  That’s a shocking fact.  UN Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in 2000, called for a gender perspective that would consider the special needs of women and girls both during conflict and in post-conflict resolution.  That’s something that needs to be implemented here.  We need to see expert women in our media, not just for what they can contribute, but to show our daughters, our granddaughters what they themselves could do.  You cannot be what you cannot see.

There’s so much great stuff in this manifesto.  For me one of the crucial issues is low pay, and especially the pernicious zero hours contracts.  There are huge numbers of people, particularly but not only women, who, though they’re doing skilled and difficult jobs, can’t expect anything but zero hours contracts and the minimum wage.  That’s no way to build a future.  If institutions, public and private, can afford to pay their executives six and seven figure salaries, they can afford to pay their real workers a living wage on a proper contract.

Another is reproductive rights.  We’ve heard a shocking example just yesterday of what Northern Ireland’s situation really means to vulnerable women.  It’s telling that even Donald Trump stepped back from saying that such women should be punished.  And we’re still waiting for legislation to bring us in line with basic human rights law.