Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Fianna Fáil and Deputy O'Callaghan, in particular, for bringing this Bill before the House. It is very important and I am not sure why it has to be postponed. I thought the report and the Bill could have progressed in parallel to each other. We would have allowed various people to come in, make submissions and the report would have then been completed. However, it is welcome that the delay is now nine months instead of 12.

In welcoming the Bill I pay tribute to Women's Aid. I am not going to list out women's names because Women's Aid has done that for us and if we pick one woman, we ignore somebody else. I am going to deal with some of the figures instead. Domestic violence kills and Women's Aid has set out for us what that means completely. Domestic violence kills both women and children and the people who work for and volunteer with Women's Aid hear from women about the types of abuse and behaviour that precede it every day. When women call Women's Aid and tell us they are afraid for their lives, we believe them. Women's Aid, among other organisations on the ground, has been telling us and successive Governments for a very long time that domestic violence is prevalent, very serious violence that leads to murders year after year. Every step of progress was forced by pressure and, unfortunately, another death.

It is difficult as a woman to read out the total figures to date. We have learned from the femicide watch project, something I cannot believe we need in 2019, that seven women died violently in 2018 and that was only by November. It goes on to tell us that ten women on average die violently every single year in Ireland, which is almost one a month. I will not exaggerate. Some 225 women have died violently between 1996 and 2008, with 16 children, leaving 125 children without mothers, although I do not have the up-to-date figure.

I said I would not read out the names, but it is worth reading out the ages. We are discussing this against the backdrop of an ongoing case that I am not going to comment on except in relation to the age of the victim, who was 14 years old. The women who have been murdered in the last while range in age from 13 up to women in their 60s. The women who died in 2018 were a 43 year old, a 49 year old, a 22 year old, an 18 year old, a 31 year old, a 39 year old and a 29 year old. They were all victims.

I am uncomfortable with using the word "welcome", but I am welcoming this legislation against the backdrop of inadequate funding for domestic and gender-based violence, in the context of inadequate provision of refuges for women where they can go for safety and a narrative that focuses on the woman as someone anonymous in all of this. The reporting talks about what an unusual act it was for the perpetrator at a given time.

It spoke of what an unusual act it had been and said he was a pillar of society, among other things. There were details of the murder of the woman and nothing about her life or how she lived but a complete apology for the man who did it. They are my views but also those of Women's Aid which, in its Femicide Watch 2018, made specific recommendations for the Government. The first was exactly what Deputy O'Callaghan has asked for, namely, a domestic homicide review to be set up on a statutory basis with the appropriate specialists. Domestic homicide reviews are in place in the UK, New Zealand and many other jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the United States; therefore, there was nothing to stop this or previous Governments from introducing this mechanism and doing the research before this Bill if they had taken domestic violence and murder seriously. Clearly, that has never been the case but I welcome the fact that the research has taken place at last. I have always had a difficulty with the reporting of "domestic incidents". They are not domestic incidents, but the most serious assaults, some of them culminating in murder. It is time we changed the narrative because if we do not, we will never learn, even if we set up homicide review mechanisms.

Women's Aid has also made 13 recommendations on media reporting and I ask journalists and the Government to look at them and consider the narrative of these cases. Women's Aid asked for positive and responsible reporting on domestic abuse and homicide to improve the public's understanding and support those affected. If we do not do that we will simply not learn or make homes safer places for women and children. There has been talk about the press council working in partnership and I recommend that the Minister and his speech writers read what they have to say and learn. We cannot be political in any way about this and we cannot have any more murders without learning from them. I pay tribute to Women's Aid on this point.

There is a lack of funding, a lack of refuges and a lack of evidence-based figures, because we cannot rely on the Garda figures. The Central Statistics Office was before the Committee of Public Accounts recently and its representatives said the statistics were published under reservation so we need accurate statistics. It has taken us three years for this Dáil to force the Government to review the SAVI report, which was conducted in 2002. It worries me that we set up a scoping report first to delay the process. That was produced on 18 April 2018 and it will be a long time until the review is completed as it will not begin before summer 2021 and will take a few years to complete. If we were seriously interested in dealing with domestic violence, abuse and murder we would have started this much sooner and done it more quickly. I understand the Central Statistics Office has 75 vacancies and the impact that might have on carrying out this very important research concerns me.

I do not like to talk about the costs to the economy of domestic violence, abuse and murder, but it is €2.2 billion per year. The Minister told us that €23.8 million was given for victims of domestic and sexual violence and the Government might be congratulating itself on this but Safe Ireland and NUI Galway research estimate that the cost is much higher. The research is ongoing and looks at the economic and social costs of domestic violence across three phases of a survivor's journey. I am not here to lecture but because I know intimately the effects of domestic violence on children, women and on the wider society. We need to look at this and to allocate sufficient funding because €23.8 million is not a figure about which the Government can boast when the cost to the economy is in billions of euro. As the programme manager with Safe Ireland said, if we allocate adequate and targeted resources to prevention and support for survivors of domestic violence, we save lives, we restore futures and we save billions. I ask the Minister to read that piece.

I support the Bill. I am not sure why it has to be delayed, but I understand that it is in agreement with Fianna Fáil. I welcome the initiative from Deputy O'Callaghan.

See this speech in context