COMMITTEE:THE LACK of women approved by the Cabinet for ambassadorial posts was challenged by the National Women's Council at the Oireachtas Committee on Justice yesterday.

Of the 30 diplomatic candidates approved by the Cabinet on Tuesday, just three were women.

National Women’s Council director Susan McKay read out the list of appointments to the committee and asked why it was dominated by men.

“It can’t be that there aren’t women in this country who are capable of representing this country abroad,” she said.

Fianna Fáil TD Noel Treacy said these successful candidates were all “top class” people and it was open to both genders to apply for the posts.

Ms McKay said there clearly were not enough women at a high enough level to put their names forward. Instead of talking about glass ceilings, women were now talking about greasy floors because there were so many women at the lower levels in organisations.

She said it was shocking that the Dáil was 86 per cent male and said this meant that Ireland had one of the highest proportion of males politicians in the world. “We must insist that this outrageous obliviousness to the absence of women is stopped.”

Ms McKay said a package of reforms should be in place before the next general election. She supported the call in the committee’s Women’s Participation in Politics report for gender quotas in selecting candidates and for a data bank of potential women candidates.

The National Women’s Council is now working on a campaign to encourage a greater female representation in politics and will be writing to all party leaders and general secretaries asking if they will support gender quotas.

Senator Ivana Bacik said there had not been a debate about women’s participation in politics in the Dáil or Seanad in the nine decades since independence.

A Seanad debate on women’s participation in politics had been promised to mark International Women’s Day this week but it did not happen, she said.