‘You look like a porn star’ – the abuse women face in politics as parties seek to hit gender quota

South Dublin county councillor Teresa Costello was sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon last month when she received a phone call from an unknown number. The 47-year-old had just returned from a clinic, where she listens to and attempts to assist locals from her electoral ward of Tallaght Central.
“I answered the phone and it was a man. He asked me: ‘Are you Teresa Costello?’ and said: ‘You look like a porn star, how could you be capable of doing anything for your community?’” the Fianna Fáil representative recalls. “He said: ‘With your dyed blonde hair, your fake face and teeth.’
“He was saying, how could anybody take you seriously with how you look, and told me to let my hair grow out and not have any blonde any more.”
Costello has been a councillor since 2019 and in recent months was announced as a general election candidate for Fianna Fáil in Dublin South West, alongside the party’s sitting TD John Lahart. While she loves her role as a local representative and describes herself as a “strong-willed person”, she asks rhetorically: “Would a man get that call?”
“He probably wouldn’t be told that he looks like a porn star,” she says.
Costello, who is running for election at national level for the first time, “fell into politics” after being diagnosed with breast cancer more than 10 years ago and subsequently establishing an online support group for patients.
She says remarks about her appearance come up often, and references a separate occasion when a photograph of her standing beside Tánaiste and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin at an event surfaced online.
“One comment I saw [about me] said: ‘What’s the story with your one with the male pattern baldness’,” she says. “I said ‘it’s a product of cancer’. I could understand people being upset over things like that but I’m probably at a stage in my life where I have perspective. I’m living and breathing, and I have a happy life and I think the majority of these people don’t even know what they stand for. They’re not happy with themselves.”
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Costello is among 127 female candidates out of 341 who have so far announced that they are running in the next general election, according to figures provided by Women for Election, a non-profit organisation campaigning to increase the number of women in elected office. The number of women candidates represents 37.2 per cent of total candidates declared so far.
Although no date has been announced for the election, the gender quota for political parties running candidates is increasing from 30 to 40 per cent. If a party doesn’t reach that quota it loses 50 per cent of State funding, which would amount to hundreds of thousands of euro in the case of the three largest parties, based on recent figures.
Brian Sheehan, chief executive of Women for Election, acknowledges that when a woman steps into public life, they are “judged or observed or approached in a different way, and that’s a challenge”.
Over the past week, the home of the Fine Gael Minister for Justice Helen McEntee was subject to an alleged bomb threat, while a farmer was convicted of assaulting Fianna Fáil junior minister Anne Rabbitte by throwing a sealed bag of cow dung at her at a public meeting in Co Galway last year.
Despite these incidents, Sheehan believes there will be a lot more women running at the next election, a rise from 162 candidates in 2020. He expects all parties to meet the 40 per cent gender quota.
“Many parties have worked hard to find really good women out there and have brought them forward through the local elections to help them understand the whole process if they haven’t been through it before,” he says.
As of Thursday, Aontú had the highest percentage of women candidates running, at 53 per cent, according to Women for Election, followed by the Social Democrats (47 per cent), Fianna Fáil and the Green Party (both 41 per cent).
Sinn Féin stands at 40 per cent, followed by Fine Gael (37 per cent), the Labour Party (36 per cent) Solidarity-People Before Profit (25 per cent) and Independent Ireland (22 per cent).
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Independent Ireland, the newly formed political party that includes TDs Michael Collins, Richard O’Donoghue and Michael Fitzmaurice, says it wants to run a “balanced gender ticket motivated by merit as opposed to being incentivised by gender quotas”.
In response to queries, the party said in a statement: “Like all parties, it is difficult to find female candidates who wish to get involved in electoral politics given the unique challenges women face in the political arena.
“And, like all parties, we are offering our candidates and potential candidates, both male and female, as much support as possible in order to encourage them to take the leap into the electoral foray.”
Keira Keogh (38) was selected as a candidate for Fine Gael in Mayo along with the party’s TD and junior minister Alan Dillon. Keogh, who works as a child behaviour consultant, was unsuccessful at the local elections in June but says the forthcoming retirement of veteran Fine Gael TD Michael Ring felt like “a once in a lifetime opportunity” to run for a Dáil seat.
“When I let people know of my decision to run now, there’s some people saying: ‘You will never meet someone now and you will never get married and never have children,’” she says.
Keogh goes further, suggesting that some people still may not see the political sphere as a place for women.
“That thing of ‘is this the right place for women?’ is still a little bit there in Irish society,” she says. “I often hear female politicians aren’t attractive to men – our purpose on Earth is not just to be attractive to men.”
Keogh says she didn’t receive much abuse on social media during her last electoral campaign but it is something she is conscious of, “especially when you step up to national level”.
“I would look on Helen McEntee or Hildegarde Naughton or Maria Walsh’s Twitter or Instagram and it is daunting when you hear of stalkers and things like that,” she says.
Keogh also points out that only 131 women have been elected to Dáil Éireann.
“I just feel a big responsibility here to step up. I think we need more women to step up,” she adds. “The support I’ve been given as a new candidate by Fine Gael has really helped. They ran a female mentor programme last year – only for female candidates – and it was really helpful to have that support network. I think I would struggle a bit more as an Independent candidate not having that network.”
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Natasha Newsome Drennan (48) has been chosen as Sinn Féin’s candidate in Carlow-Kilkenny along with Áine Gladney Knox, both first-time candidates who missed out at the local elections. Newsome Drennan, who has worked in the disability sector for the past 18 years, says she is the only female candidate she knows of running on the Kilkenny side of the constituency.
“It’s all male. That’s a plus for me,” she says. “People look at females and say: ‘They are great, they can juggle home and work life, know how to manage money.’ It should work in my favour; I would be hopeful that it would.”
She says the biggest challenge setting out as a new candidate is “not being known”, with sitting TDs – Fianna Fáil’s John McGuinness and Jennifer Murnane O’Connor (based in Carlow) and the Green Party’s Malcolm Noonan – all running in the five-seat constituency.
However, her party colleague Kathleen Funchion’s move to Europe and the decision of Fine Gael’s John Paul Phelan to stand down at the next general election create openings for new candidates.
Sheehan agrees that incumbency is the biggest factor in limiting first-time female candidates and points to the recent local election results. A total of 797 councillors (84 per cent) stood for re-election, comprising 594 men and 203 women, leaving 267 seats available for new candidates. Some 85 per cent of councillors standing again were re-elected.
Of the total 949 seats up for grabs, 247 seats were won by women candidates, with just three local authorities reaching 40 per cent and over in terms of female representatives. This was despite a record 681 women running for election.
“Because there’s a lot of openings, particularly in Fine Gael, we hope to see a lot more women elected at the next general election,” says Sheehan.
“But we’re still at 23 per cent in terms of the proportion of women in the Dáil and 103rd in the world for the number of women in national government. We’ve a long way to go to make a significant dent in that huge imbalance.”