Listowel Connection: Super needlewomen and Gender Quotas

These ladies with their teacher, Priscilla Sweeney, are doing a needlecraft course under the VEC in Listowel Family Resource Centre. When I visited them on Friday they were working on their Listowel quilt project. The ladies are taking well known images of Listowel and working them into a patchwork quilt.

Each pupil keeps a journal of the project. The journals themselves are works of Art. Here is one example of such a journal.

Another of their patchwork projects is a life-sized two dimensional horse. Here is an account, from the journal, of the processes involved in that project.

A sample of patchwork

The completed horse

Each student made their own smaller horse. This is Angela's.

The process

On Friday Priscilla had brought another piece for the students to work on. It was a clown bag suitable for laundry, toys or anything that needed tidying in a child's room

<<<<<<

Gender Quotas: Does the end justify the means?

This is Edel Clancy of the 50/50 Group and she argued the case for gender quotas in politics at Women in Media Weekend in Ballybunion. Mary O'Rourke and Mairead MacGuinness were her "opposition".

Edel told us that:

There has never been fewer than 85% men in Dáil Eireann.
Since the foundation of the state there have been only 12 women in cabinet.
Ireland is in 92nd. place in the world in terms of representation by women in parliament.

The facts are irrefutable. Something has to be done to correct this imbalance. Gender quotas is a blunt instrument to get us over the initial hurdle. In time, like Denmark, we won't need them.

Mary O'Rourke and Mairead MacGuinness offered no argument as convincing as these statistics.

I'm for gender quotas and I'm glad that political parties will, in future, be fined if 30% of candidates are not female.

<<<<<<

Some people I met at the weekend