The Eagle Interviews Ivana Bacik TD by Jacob Hudson [Page

By Jacob Hudson, SF Law and Political Science

It was a pleasure to interview Deputy Ivana Bacik for this edition of The Eagle. Having won the recent Dublin Bay South by-election with a convincing 30.2 per cent of the vote, the Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College is now Leinster House’s newest TD. As a former President of the Trinity Student Union, Bacik was threatened with prison in the infamous SPUC v Grogan case in the Supreme Court. Since then, the Labour TD has become an active and vocal civil rights campaigner and indeed, a leading figure in the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment. From 2007 until her election to the Dáil, Bacik sat on the Trinity panel of the Seanad, serving as the Upper House’s Deputy Leader in the coalition government of 2011-2016. During this time, she has introduced many pieces of legislation on areas including workers rights, LGBTQ equality and climate action.

I was delighted the Government did not oppose the Renters’ Rights Bill that Rebecca Moynihan and I had brought forward. It has now passed the second stage of the Dáil, which is great! We’ll certainly be pushing for further progress on it. So, essentially what the Bill would do if it became law would be three things:

First, it provides for greater security of tenure. So, it provides for tenancy of indefinite duration. In other words, people cannot be evicted easily. That there are restrictions on the reasons which a landlord must give for bringing a tenancy to an end. So, that’s the first thing.

The second thing is that it would ensure that rents are more affordable - rents and deposits - as it would place caps on deposits, and as part of our programme, we are proposing a three year rent freeze as well.

And then, finally, and perhaps, just as importantly, the Bill would provide for a better quality of life for renters. So, in other words, give people the right to rent an unfurnished apartment or home, if they wish, which is absolutely the norm in other European countries but isn’t perhaps in Ireland. This is one of the reasons why people often find it difficult to put down roots or make a permanent or long-term home in rented accommodation, because they have to live with the furniture the landlord has left there. So, it’s that sort of thing - the right to keep pets and air dry clothes. These are all the sort of provisions that we have included in the Bill.

bells that ring throughout Leinster House before the Dáil is about to sit, calling TDs to the chamber]. But, it’s certainly a very different, sort of, environment.

The Seanad has a more, dare I say it, courteous environment! In the Seanad, we had 40 per cent women; 40 per cent of Senators are women and in the Dáil, unfortunately only 23 per cent of TDs are women. So it does make for a much more male-dominated environment in the Dáil. It feels more adversarial, partly to do with the nature of it. Government ministers are drawn from TDs and so on. Certainly the debate style is very different and the approach to debating is different.

That has taken a bit of getting used to. But, I am really enjoying representing my local constituency, my community and doing all the really interesting events and meetings and representations from local groups and individuals. So that has been a real pleasure!

I really miss the students actually! Trinity has been very good and I am on a career break now for the duration of this Dáil term, which obviously gives me a lot more time to engage in political representation and advocacy. But I do really miss the engagement with the students. I absolutely love teaching and particularly love teaching subjects that I really enjoyed as a student myself, like criminology, criminal law, and then, I had the pleasure of teaching small groups in feminist criminology in recent years. These were all brilliant students and brilliant subjects! I miss that and I hope someday to get back to it but of course, I am still actively researching so that doesn’t stop!

I was lucky enough to be in the Law School in the late 80s as a student when we had a very political faculty. We had Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. We had Kader Asmal, who went on to become the first post-apartheid Minister for Water Affairs and then Education in South Africa. We had a superb faculty and they were really engaged.

I was, I suppose, very political myself, involved in the Student Union and the Labour Society and Women’s groups and then, I was elected President [of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union]. And then, as you say Jacob, the SPUC v Grogan case hit, we were taken to court and threatened with prison for giving information on abortion to women in crisis pregnancy and that was certainly, absolutely a pivotal experience for me. I will never forget the harrowing - absolutely harrowing - experiences of what so many women and girls had gone through when they came to contact us in the Students’ Union to ask for a phone number that they couldn’t get anywhere else. Women in desperate circumstances. So that certainly has been the driving force for me in remaining politically active in the decades since. And it was such a relief when we finally repealed the Eighth Amendment in 2018, so that we can now provide women with reproductive healthcare and abortion services here in Ireland.

State and it has a proud track record of actually implementing and bringing about change on a range of economic and social issues.

But, I do think that Labour has the best track record on equality, on solidarity, on fairness. These are the pivotal values of Labour. These are the key values that remain our founding values of the political party and indeed, as a political movement. So, I have no doubt in my mind that Labour will grow again. I think we are in a period of regrowth. There is a tradition that smaller parties tend to be punished for going into government but I think Labour, unlike many other small parties, are actually keen to see change happen and to effectively implement the change that we believe in. So, to do that, parties need to go into government and that is the reality. I think Labour is building and the by-election result over the summer which I am so thrilled with, I think that was a sign of the rebuilding of the party.