Ms Mary McDermott:

Safe Ireland works in a moment of hope. We really believe we are at a historic moment. Parties, businesses and individuals have approached us. Everybody wants to do something about this. You can see it. Everybody knows it exists. No Going Back was written under the pressure of Covid. We said we have to reframe this. The Deputy will see from my notes on my submission that there are secondary notes under the other recommendations I did not speak to because last week, my colleagues put in substantive issues there. What I wanted to note was that the issue of language and conceptualisation is crucial. First, we have a very simple statement. Nobody should have to live in an oppressive home. That goes straight to all the tropes and fatalism upon which we rely all the time - you made your bed now lie in it. Second, we believe we need new language to describe this. In our opinion, the axis of DSGBV runs along sex, gender and sexualities. There is a hierarchy under all of those categories and you can track the lines of power and control. We believe we must extend and increase our capacity to speak about this by extending our vocabulary and conceptualisations. Mr. Cooke and I have had quite a few head-banging sessions on this issue. We say that we need to make room for more people and younger people whose identities and concerns are different to our own and we need to be able to conceptualise DSGBV across the standard social exclusion and poverty categories of our national social policy, a project we are working on with TASC, and to address it across the issues that arise under what we call diversity and inclusion. If you put sex, gender and sexuality as the core axis along which this violence runs, I believe you will develop a really robust and sophisticated way of speaking about this and will, therefore, be able to develop a social policy that will meet that demand.