Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

In the just over two minutes available to me I welcome the Bill and commend Solidarity on bringing it before the House. I have no difficulty in supporting the substance of the Bill. I welcome the Minister's confirmation that he is not going to oppose it. I hope it is the start of a discussion about the much broader issue of child protection. We changed the Constitution in 2012, ostensibly to protect children, but I believe we have utterly failed. One only has to open the newspaper on any given day and there is horror story after horror story. I saw one such story no later than Monday in The Irish Times. I will not go into the details but it concerned a man who was jailed for 12 years who thinks his sentence is too long. We need to empower young people but we cannot begin to empower children to come forward about abuse if we cannot have normal and natural conversations about sexuality in the first place, full of information and within a loving environment. To do that, we need to make available very factual information in a frank way without the influence of the church or any other body, in a dependent manner. That is essential.

Many Deputies have raised the SAVI report in the House. The report dates to 2002. A staggering 47% of the 3,120 people interviewed said that they had never mentioned the abuse they experienced to anybody in their lives. I re-read those figures when I am using them in various debates and each time I am shocked at the high level of non-disclosure. As a society we need to look at that. One third of women and almost one quarter of men who participated reported some level of abuse in childhood, while 40% of women and 28% of men reported some sort of sexual assault during their lifetime. I could quote more and more figures, but the point I am making in my limited time is that the horror of sexual abuse needs to be openly discussed. We need to empower children to come forward. We need to provide services in order that young people come forward. We need to update our data, which essentially means updating the SAVI report. It has taken up to now to confirm that a scoping exercise is in place with a view to producing a new report but the date keeps slipping, and that is simply a precursor to doing a full report. In that context, I welcome the Bill.

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