Longford councillor to speak at See Her Elected event during National Ploughing Championships

Longford councillor Uruemu Adejinmi  is to speak at a See Her Elected event during the National Ploughing Championships next week.

See Her Elected, the award-winning Government funded project which aims to encourage women from rural areas to become county councillors will attend this year’s National Ploughing Championships in Ratheniska, Co Laois.

Following on from last year’s success at the ploughing championships, the See Her Elected team will return to Ratheniska to engage with political parties and women from rural Ireland. A new series of Free online SHESchool workshops also gets underway on the week beginning September 18th to coincide with the ploughing championships.

Programme Manager with See Her Elected, Dr Michelle Maher is keen to appeal to as many rural women as possible and she has encouraged women to come along to a number of events at the ploughing championships on Wednesday, September 20th to find out how See Her Elected can help prepare women to run for local election.

“See Her Elected will be joining a panel discussion on women in local politics in the Fine Gael stand at 12 noon on Wednesday, September 20th so come along to find out more about our work and how we can prepare women with the practical skills and knowledge to run for election. I will be joined on the panel by Cllr Thomasina O’ Connell and local election candidates Vivienne Phelan and Catherine Callaghan.

“See Her Elected will also be taking to the stage in the Fianna Fáil tent on September 20th at 2.30pm in discussion with Cllr Uruemu Adejinmi while later that day we will be filming a video with Sinn Féin’s Spokesperson on Agriculture Claire Kerrane and local election candidate Michelle Shahid. We will also be engaging with all the other political parties who are taking a stand at the ploughing to help encourage more women to run for local election,” said Dr Maher.

“Our vision is to empower women from rural Ireland to become county councillors. Increases in female representation has mainly been in the urban areas of Dublin and adjoining counties. SHE wants to increase the number of women elected to county councils. We engage with women in rural Ireland through our online Free SHESchool workshops and classes and we currently have thousands of women from rural counties on our mailing list and we have delivered hundreds of workshops over the past number of years as we help women to prepare for the Local Elections in 2024. You don’t have to be a candidate, but you may want to become involved and help get another woman elected so come along and find out about our work,” continued Dr Maher

“The women in SHESchool are all from rural Ireland- many from farming backgrounds who want to make a difference in their rural communities. Many women are the backbone of rural Ireland as they are leaders in community groups such as GAA, school boards and Tidy Towns which is all politics with a small ‘p’ and it’s about making the jump from that work onto the ballot paper,” said Dr Maher.

Copies of the See Her Elected book ‘A Guide to Running in the 2024 Local Elections’ which is a user-friendly guide to running for election will be available at the ploughing championships. The organisation was also crowned winners in the Democracy category of the Innovation in Politics Award by the EU in Brussels which was a first for Ireland.

Only 26% of councillors in Ireland are women and there is a major difficultly with an under representation of women in local politics in rural Ireland. For example, there is only one woman out of 19 councillors on Offaly County Council:  2 out of 30 on Mayo County Council; 3 out of 18 in Leitrim; 4 out of 18 in Roscommon and 2 out of 18 in Carlow. It’s a little higher in County Laois where 5 out of 19 councillors are women so we would like to see an increase in other rural counties. In almost one hundred years there have only been 11 women elected to Monaghan County Council (since 1925) and likewise only 14 women elected to Westmeath County Council in almost 100 years!

More information is available from info@seeherelected.ie or by logging onto www.seeherelected.ie

See Her Elected is a joint initiative between Longford Women’s Link and 50/50 North West. The project is funded by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.