Thank you for that kind introduction and thank you for the invitation to address this gathering.  It gives me an opportunity to remember with great affection my friend, the late Miriam Reynolds, a founder member of this Association and a superb and humane lawyer whose death just a few years ago left a void in the lives of many people and particularly those of her husband Frank and her two beloved boys Daragh and Cillian.

But Miriam would have revelled in the success of the IWLA and no doubt would have been as delighted to see Noeline Blackwell honoured here this evening as I am and I would like to add my own congratulations to Noeline and express my appreciation of the value of her work over many decades and particularly with FLAC.

In the cacophony of voices that emerged to challenge or to advise on certain of the decisions that were made following the banking collapse of 2008, Noeline’s stood out.  While others were strident, she was calm, while others were hostile, she was reasoned, while others flailed all around them in anger or indeed in fear, Noeline remained at all times clear, compassionate; understanding of the political play, yet playing herself with a perfectly straight arrow, slowly coaxing the main players into an understanding of the lot of those laid low by the bad political and financial decisions of others. And so I congratulate Noeline on receiving this inaugural award tonight and I commend the IWLA for their excellent choice.

I should say that the last time Noeline and I met, along with Chief Justice Denham and former President McAleese, all four of us were brightly dressed in baby blue and canary yellow, the rather eye catching UCD academic robes as this sober and mature quartet were awarded Honours by the University. One photograph of the day showed the four of us happily gambolling around a Belfield garden in those baby blues and yellows, the sight of which prompted one online newspaper to insert the caption, Harry Potter and Hogwarts anyone? We can only be grateful that Phoenix magazine had already gone to press.

I also congratulate the IWLA on their work over the last 12 years to promote and support women working in the law. I doubt somehow when Michael McDowell and the late Rory Brady moved to support its creation in 2002 that either gentleman anticipated the top level takeover of pretty much all of the legal jobs held previously by the boys. A case perhaps of not being careful what you wish for.

I recalled to Noeline on that last time we met that in the late 1990s in New Zealand it so happened that a slew of the top political and public service positions were held by women, a situation which prompted one newspaper, on learning that the new head of the armed forces would in fact be a man, to announce “It’s a boy!”. 

But I am also conscious that the stellar success of the women at the top of your profession, while undoubtedly gratifying and motivating for women at entry or middle levels in itself,  counter intuitively perhaps, imposes a certain pressure on other women lawyers still making their way in a very competitive field.

If you are for example a neophyte barrister struggling out of Supervalu some evening with a baby freshly released from its crèche in one hand, and the night’s dinner in the other, the thought that other women have somehow managed to climb all the way from near penury and overwhelming stress right to the dizzy heights of the profession can be as soul-destroying as it is uplifting. The path between the supermarket car park and the Supreme Court bench can seem not just long but bafflingly poorly signposted.

The fact that women have now attained the most senior legal positions in the public service, in the private sector,  and in the courts, can mask the reality of the struggle of others, whether it’s trying to make headway at the Bar in difficult economic times, dealing with the long hours culture of certain parts of the private sector, or with the challenges of most working mothers in a cultural environment that continues to pay largely lip service to the ideal of a healthy work and home balance.

Despite the great strides that have been made over the last few decades, the general model of the working day is one that largely ignores the lived reality of many modern families and above all the emotional demands of childrearing. And I believe that this will not fundamentally change until women are freed, through their emergence in volume at every level in the public and private sectors, to make the demands that many still feel inhibited from making. It will not change until affordable quality childcare is seen as part of this country’s basic economic toolkit and not a luxury commodity for the better off.

All of you will be familiar with the debate about gender quotas whether in politics or at corporate board level and elsewhere and you will be aware of the work the EU Commission is doing to promote greater gender balance at board level and particularly in the bigger publicly quoted companies.  Like much that goes through the EU political and bureaucratic sausage machine, the fine proposals that initially emerged have been somewhat diluted but the attempt to make big companies in particular take note of gender balance as part of their corporate governance framework means at the very least that they will be forced to explain themselves if the paltry levels of women on those boards throughout much of the EU do not rise.

My belief is that the debate needs to be framed in a different way, that we need to move from just shaming companies into compliance to demonstrating that it is in their bottom line interests to encourage and promote greater female participation in decision making and this of course doesn’t just apply to private corporations but right across the public and private sectors from law firms to banks to Government departments and public sector agencies.

Hiring and promoting women is an act of commercial common sense.  The World Bank has estimated that the closing of the employment gender gap could boost GDP by 13% in the Eurozone alone. The corporate world in particular also needs to get over its at times allergic reaction to the prospect of hiring young and annoyingly fertile women.  And may I say that the provision of company fridges for the storing of those young women’s eggs, while they focus exclusively on the corporate needs of their companies is not, gentlemen of Google and Facebook, quite what we had in mind about work life balance.

The head of the IMF, French woman Christine Lagarde blamed an excess of testosterone for the calamitous decisions that were made in western economies and western banks that led to economic collapse and the appalling collateral damage inflicted on so many individuals and families.  And while that might seem like a clever if somewhat glib and even sexist remark, it appears that Christine may have the evidence of neuroscience on her side.

The New York Times recently reported on the results of research conducted by a number of cognitive neuroscientists in the United States which claims to prove that under stress, women make better decisions than men. They found that under normal circumstances, when everything is low-key and manageable, men and women make decisions about risk in similar ways. We gather the best information we can, we weigh potential costs against potential gains, and then we choose how to act. But add stress to the situation and men and women begin to part ways.

 “Across a variety of gambles, the findings were the same: Men took more risks when they were stressed. They became more focused on big wins, even if they were costly and less likely.”

And if we take Anglo Irish Bank, whose culture essentially comprised a corporate gambling addiction that subsequently moved virus like across the entire Irish banking sector, we can see the truth of that.

Those of you who listened to the Anglo tape recordings of conversations between some of the former key players as their world was collapsing around them would also recognise the truth of Christine Lagarde’s observation as evidence of an extreme macho banking culture was laid bare. The language was locker room, the metaphors crude and graphic, and despite the imminent, inevitable collapse of their world, there was an exhilaration and a charge in their voices that more than anything told us all we needed to know about why our world too was about to collapse.

As an exercise for this address, I examined the Board membership of Anglo, AIB, and Bank of Ireland in 2006, the year in which both profits and delirium peaked in all three institutions.  Anglo had thirteen male and one single female director. Bank of Ireland had seven male Directors of the Court as they style themselves and not a single woman while AIB had nine male directors and one female.

The Central Bank, charged with regulating all of these boys and the two girls, had 13 directors including just one woman, a novelist.

As a further exercise I decided to see what was happening now, a time when we are assured that all of our bad habits had been eradicated and we are facing into the brave new dawn of impeccable corporate governance.

So imagine my surprise when I found that Bank of Ireland currently has 12 male directors and just one female , AIB has ten male directors and just one female, while Permanent TSB has ten male and just two female directors.

It seems extraordinary, and particularly given the level of control that the Government has been able to exert over banking behaviour in the last six years, that female participation in the institutions that ran our economy into the ground in 2008, is no different to what it was during that period of testosterone charged gambling stroke responsible banking.

I also checked the board membership of Lehman Brothers just prior to its collapse: nine men, one woman.

But would more female participation make a difference? The neuroscientists were dealing with human laboratory rats in laboratory conditions, what would it be like in the real, messy world?

The New York Times asked the same question and reported that Credit Suisse examined almost 2,400 corporations from 2005 to 2011 – including the years directly preceding and following the financial crisis – and found that large companies with women on the board outperformed comparable companies with all-male boards by 26 per cent.

So where does all that rather interesting research leave Irish professional women and particularly those trying to make their way in highly competitive professions such as the law?

I think it should make women lawyers more confident in asserting their rights to preferment and to inclusion at the top levels of their institutions. If we believe in the conclusions of this and other research, companies need to realise that female preferment is a good business decision and not an act of gender charity.

It should also make the rest of us more confident in challenging the status quo and the claims of those who choose not to believe that institutional barriers continue to exist to prevent female participation at high levels in the public and private sector.

Earlier this week, Ireland emerged as the 8th best country in the world for women a statistic which would seem to bely much of what I am saying here this evening, Yet a close look at the statistics showed the heavy weighting afforded to the fact that a high level of women enter third level, and the fact that we have recently had two female heads of state. The fact that the head of state in this country wields no executive power was underplayed and while the report undoubtedly showed great progress in many areas, the devil in the detail showed the continuing leeching out of female participation post those University years. We have  a huge cohort of brilliant, highly educated  young women but not yet the cultural underpinning to allow that talent to continue to progress in a similar manner to men.

The fact that our banks – the institutions that we and our families are enormously dependent on to function well and to function ethically – are still virtually run by men alone – four women directors out of 34 – suggests that the stated desire to change the culture is not yet being made a reality.

This is not to say that the men on those boards are not of the highest calibre and integrity, but rather that we are all poorly served by the absence of the female consciousness, the female experience, the female way of being and of seeing, from these and from other vital institutions.

But of course those are journeys that take time, that involve, political, social, cultural, even economic shifts while most women simply need to get on with their own lives in the present, to find professional fulfilment even if the world of work has still a long way to go before the reality of women’s lives and experience is given full expression.

Many of the women who I referenced earlier, those have taken over the top positions in law, emerged into adulthood at a point in Irish life when the laws of the land – and not just sentiment, prejudice or misogyny – copper fastened the inferior position of women in the public sphere and again I don’t need to remind this audience what those laws were.  Support for mothers working outside the home were minimal to non-existent and indeed a great many women, just half a generation before them, had the stark choice of career or family with a majority of those that reached high office in the middle of the last century and for several decades beyond foregoing marriage and children.

So when we look at our own young adult daughters now, and see the opportunities they have unimagined even in the seventies and eighties, we know that they are a privileged generation of women but we also know that as individuals, they have to find in their own selves the strength, creativity and determination to forge a satisfying professional life for themselves and that they have to rely above all on their brains, their own characters, their own drive to make that a reality. We, as their mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, or mentors, need to show them that despite the undeniable barriers, the fact that the world is still pretty much man-shaped, that they can achieve their own professional and personal goals even so.

Last year, I decided to apply for the job of European Ombudsman. Unlike most jobs in the EU , gained either through open competition or Member State Government appointment such as EU Commissioner, EU court Judge or member of the Court of Auditors, this one is decided by the European Parliament alone. To get it, you have to put yourself out there in a  very public way, effectively run for office and cope with the nerve shredding, exhausting, humbling, and frequently irrational rollercoaster ride that is an election campaign.

Recently I read that women are often prevented from running for office, as opposed to applying for office, because of the nature of an election campaign itself and not necessarily because of quotas or an antipathy to the subsequent lifestyle. Most of us would rather list our fabulous qualities on a confidential piece of paper or encrypted online form than bellow them into someone’s ears and litter them about the place on shiny election literature.

Running for election forces women to do what many of us in childhood were told we should never do as young ladies; we have to show off, we have to say we’re better than others, we have to be immodest as we tell our story and we have to very publicly push and shove to get ahead.

I can honestly say that it was the hardest, most stressful thing I ever did in my life. I spent three months over and back between Brussels, Strasbourg and Dublin, meeting with dozens of individual MEPs, going before party groups to plead my case, continuing to do the day job and fighting my twin fears of lifts and flying.  Every day I climbed up hundreds and hundreds of stairs, made my pitch, watched the opposition, self-medicated on warm sauvignon blanc and pringles on the flights home, went into uber Mommy mode at the weekends with far too many guilt trips, literally, to Penneys, and then back again for more punishment.

There were many times when I questioned my sanity, my decision to run, but once I had made that decision there was no way back, outside of retiring from the field, and at the end of the process, two doors awaited, one marked win and the other lose.

I tell you all that not to pat myself on the back but rather to share with you what I learned about myself, what I learned about determination, about ambition, about fear and self-doubt, but above all about the fact that when push comes to shove we have to fight our own battles, draw on our own individual strengths and to quote that old cliché, to feel the fear and do it anyway.

I remember one time in the middle of the campaign, fed up with flying, I took the scenic route to Strasbourg. Armed with 700 election leaflets stuffed in a suitcase, I dragged it and myself from Dublin Port to Holyhead, then on to London, then down the long Euston Road to the Eurostar at St Pancras's, then on to Paris, an overnight in a station hotel and then at dawn the next morning, a rather nervous walk through dark and empty streets to the Gare de l’Est and onwards to Strasbourg.  But let me tell you, that a return journey, some weeks later, with an election victory behind me, was very pleasurable indeed and this time I passed on the station hotel.

I know that no one’s experience can be transposed in its totality or even at all. But what I believe is true of everyone is that attitude perhaps above all is the single biggest determinant of success or failure or just simple mediocrity.  We all know of brilliant people with so little confidence or so little drive, or so little determination, that they will never achieve what their intellectual ability should theoretically entitle them to achieve. I don’t know if it’s something that can be taught or learned but I do know that without it, there will be limited professional success and fulfilment.

I know some people may well say, well it’s fine for her, she’s confident, or she’s bright, or she’s well connected or she – fill in the blank for whatever it is they think they are not – but as a child, from a lower middle class background attending very ordinary state schools -  I was disablingly shy.

 I spent three months in a Dublin hospital at the age of five learning to speak properly, on my first assignment as an intern reporter; I conducted an interview from a phone box on the street rather than have it overheard in the newsroom.  The idea of door stepping anyone would make me feel physically ill and for many years, I was so pathetically grateful for work that my husband would say that I was the only person he knew who could go for a job interview and come out with five grand less than what they had offered me.

And the person who changed all of that – allowing for many wonderful mentors and friends and sheer luck and serendipity along the way – was myself, and the biggest lesson I have ever learned in life is that when the chips are down, that it is you alone who has ultimately to battle and you alone who can get yourself going again.

I remember back in 1999, I had just turned forty two , had just had  my fifth child, had resigned from my job as editor of Magill magazine for reasons too complex to go into, and was the subject of a rather unflattering newspaper profile which sought to describe the Magill debacle as career ending. This followed on from a rather controversial book I had written about Veronica Guerin.

And I remember putting the baby in the buggy, and walking around the entire 10k stretch of the hill of Howth humming We Shall Overcome  and waiting for a pal to come to the summit with coffee and warm doughnuts. By the time I staggered home I was more determined than ever to get back on track and simply did not see any barriers to doing so withering profile or not.  Within a few months, I was back in full time employment and three years later was appointed National Ombudsman and Information Commissioner. 

My point is that all of us have the power to control and to write so much more of our own narrative than we think and we cannot allow others to be our ghost writers.  Every woman in this room, from the most junior apprentice to those who sit on the nation’s Supreme Court will have or will have had their own battles, their own moments or longer of self-doubt, their own brush with misogyny and unfairness and the bafflement of seeing the mediocre man get preferment over the brilliant woman or even over the just as mediocre woman, of being exhausted by trying to prove themselves over and over again. The mothers will beat themselves up and weigh their every career decision in relation to how it impacts on the family and probably nothing can fix that and nor perhaps should it.

So, to conclude, while there are undoubtedly cultural and other barriers that have the potential to limit women’s participation in the workplace, this generation of young women have opportunities that women of my generation and older could only have dreamed of. That statement of  the profoundly obvious isn’t necessarily going to make anyone currently struggling to feel better or more optimistic about their lot but this evening, in this beautiful place you all in a sense are making history, by coming here together in such numbers, with some of you now gracing the highest legal corridors of the land, and others moving inexorably to take their turn someday, coming together in a forum that really was unimaginable when I was young and when not a single female, brilliant, mediocre or otherwise, was allowed to take her place at the top table and when women lawyers were exotic in their rareness.

So well done to you all, to the wonderful Noeline, to the women who have blazed a trail, to the women who have just this last month made their way to the High and Appeal courts, but well done in particular to the young women who have emerged and who are about to emerge. May you all one day be so numerous and so embedded across all levels of the law that the Irish Women Lawyers’ Association will simply shut up shop.