New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern gave birth yesterday to a beautiful baby girl. Mother, baby, and soon to be stay-at-home Dad are reportedly all doing well. She will take six weeks’ maternity leave, and her husband will take over childcare duties after that. The overwhelming reaction online was ‘Woman gives birth. So what?’. But it’s [...]
Last year I finished a piece of research on women in politics in Rwanda after almost three years spent researching how the tiny African country has managed to top the league tables on women's representation. I first embarked upon what became my MSc as a newspaper feature for the Sunday Business Post on gender quotas in [...]
Rosie-the-Riveter (Photo credit: SBT4NOW) This week, Fianna Fáil launched a plan to get more women involved in the party. Senator Averil Power, one of the party’s two female Oireachtas members, launched the plan with party leader Micheál Martin and Niamh Gallagher of Women for Election, a non-partisan training body that is focussed on improving [...]
Mary Lou McDonald had to fight for maternity leave from the Dail - there is currently no provision for this. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I wrote this piece in March after a trip to Rwanda to meet women politicians there, and after spending about four months shadowing and interviewing women politicians in Ireland. I just [...]
I wrote this piece for the Herald on Thursday as "lapgate" began spreading on social media. The reason I'm posting it here as well is this article by Stephen Collins in today's Irish Times. Collins is right on Dail reform but he is utterly out of step on this issue; an incident of sexual harassment in [...]
Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa AND has very fertile soil. This is how that works out. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) At the moment I am busy making plans for a trip to Rwanda in February. I received funding from Irish Aid's Simon Cumbers Media Fund last summer for a project on [...]
