Ireland: Politician quits race over gender quotas

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2013-11-22 06:36

Story here. Excerpt:

'Pat Hussey, the mayor of Tralee, said Fine Gael’s “ridiculous” gender quotas could lead to many situations where “you could have a fantastic candidate overlooked for someone who doesn’t know anything at all about politics”.

He said he was in favour of increasing female representation in politics but “they have families and if they want to be politicians they’ll have to pay exorbitant money into creches* — it’s all wrong”.

Mr Hussey, Jim Finucane, Pat McCarthy, Mairead Fernane, and Grace O’Donnell put their names forward for the Tralee Electoral Area convention on Friday.

It was announced at the meeting that the gender quota directive would be implemented, meaning at least one of the three candidates going forward would have to be female.

Mr Hussey subsequently withdrew his name because he strongly disagrees with the gender quota directive.'

Hyperlinks in excerpt above were added.

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* More commonly-known in the US as "daycare facilities".

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Comments

I don't agree with why he doesn't like gender quotas, but maybe his quoted reason isn't his entire reason, or maybe there's been selective reporting on his comments. The reason gender quotas are wrong, like any others, is that they're just plain unjust to the other candidates that don't fit into the "preferred category". On top of that, it's too easy to hussle inexperienced or unskilled people along into positions they aren't ready for or patently unqualified to hold. That's not good for any enterprise.

Injustice, higher chances of bungled outcomes, waste, and inefficiencies of all kinds: this happens even without quotas, and a heck of a lot more with them.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2013-11-22 18:41