Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The facts revealed once again in today's Women's Aid annual report are shocking. They are not just shocking; they are depressing, because annually Women's Aid and other organisations release statistics which lay bare the reality of domestic violence in this State and the brutality that women and their children experience in their homes. We know that one in five women in Ireland will experience violence and abuse from an intimate partner at some stage in their lives. Women's Aid revealed that over the course of 2012, there were 3,230 disclosures of direct child abuse to its aid helpline. That is a 55% increase on last year. The helpline receives 32 calls each day and has had more than 16,000 disclosures of emotional, physical, sexual and financial abuse.

When one reads the report and moves beyond the statistics to the human experiences of these victims of abuse, the detail is quite harrowing. Women have given disclosures of being locked in and prevented from leaving their houses, being drugged, assaulted and hospitalised, being beaten while pregnant or breast-feeding, being gagged to stop screaming, being raped and sexually abused, including being pinned down and assaulted, and being forced to have sex in return for money to feed their children. These are not the kinds of scenario that I take any joy in reading into the record of this House but it is important that we understand the true, harrowing human suffering endured by large numbers of women and their children behind the statistics. Deputy Mitchell O'Connor quite rightly pointed out in her contribution that children witness these violent episodes in their homes and are damaged by that.

The programme for Government promised consolidated domestic violence legislation. I am very disappointed that the Minister has put that on the back burner in favour of other legislative priorities. Women's Aid has called, very reasonably, for an on-call system for accessing emergency barring orders to give women and their children at risk 24-7 protection. It has also called for the removal of the strict cohabitation criteria to extend eligibility for protection under the domestic violence legislation to women who are abused in dating relationships. I was disappointed in the Minister's response to a parliamentary question that I put to him in respect of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, which cited Article 52 of that convention, a provision for emergency barring orders, but set it against the property rights defined under the Irish Constitution, offering that as a rationale for this State's not signing, or indeed ratifying, the convention. The time for action is now.

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