Speaker welcomes public to Assembly Women's Week events

The Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Mitchel McLaughlin MLA, is looking forward to welcoming members of the public to the Assembly's events for its first Women's Week programme, which will begin on 7 March and continue throughout the week.

The events are all built around the theme of supporting and increasing the participation of women in all spheres of public life and will include a range of panel events and a screening of the film Suffragette which tells of the struggle to get votes for women.

Speaker McLaughlin said: "Highlighting the need for more women in the Assembly and the wider public sphere has been a priority for me since becoming Speaker. The current level of 23 women MLAs out of a total of 108 is the best the Assembly has achieved since 1998 but is still totally imbalanced compared to the fact that 51% of our population is female. Addressing that requires positive effort and a focus on the barriers women face.

"The events that make up Assembly Women's Week cover a number of different areas including looking at the obstacles to women contributing to public life in greater numbers and recognising the many role models of great female achievement which exist locally.

"Increasing the level of female participation does require commitment from parties but it needs wider community involvement rather than parties just talking to themselves. I am therefore pleased that the public will have an opportunity to attend a range of these events—and I would urge everyone to look at our website and book to come along.

"We have an election coming up and I hope Assembly Women's Week will firmly put the issue of seeing greater female participation in public life and the debate on how we achieve it back on the agenda."

More information about the Assembly Women's Week programme, including information about booking, can be found at http://assemblyweek.com/

ENDS