Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will take the first block of time and my colleague, Deputy Browne, will speak later.

I am here to give voice to those without voices, who live in fear of speaking up and speaking out. We are here to argue for and demand proper services for women in crisis. These are women who are at risk, who have gathered their courage to make life-altering decisions and who are holding their lives and safety and those of their children in their empty hands. These women have taken the momentous step of contacting, or escaping to, women's refuges, looking for support, a way out, a roof and shelter.

We could talk endlessly about statistics and figures which are stark, bleak and disturbing. We should be disturbed because we, as a society, need to be shaken out of our appalling apathy in relation to the services provided to these women and children. We need to call out the Government on its failures to implement fully the Istanbul Convention, despite what the Minister has said, its failure to build, create and maintain refuge places and its failure to support these women through the court system.

Those of us who have not been through such a situation cannot fully imagine the courage it takes for a woman to run away from an abusive partner. The toxic power struggle these women endure is unimaginable but tonight we must, for them, imagine ourselves in that situation. We must imagine what it is like to be drowning in a life of fear, never to be able to relax in one's own home, never to know what is coming next, whether it will be an assault or an attack, an attack on one's children, or for those children to witness an attack on oneself. These women summon their courage, make plans and put their very lives on the line by walking out the door to what they think is a place of safety, only to be told there is no room at a refuge.

This is not Bethlehem and there are no friendly innkeepers and mangers out the back. This is an island of 10,000 homeless people who are ahead of the woman who has left an abusive partner in the race to find accommodation. Some 24% of women escaping domestic violence are pushed and forced into homelessness. We come back again to the stark, bleak figures. According to Safe Ireland, the national social change agency working to end domestic violence, victims of domestic violence had to be turned away because services were full on 3,256 occasions last year. That is an average of approximately nine requests denied per day. Aoibhneas, the largest refuge in Dublin, turned away 365 families in 2018; one for every day of the year. Cope Galway turned away 119 women and 204 children because of a lack of capacity. Teach Tearmainn, in my constituency of Kildare South, turned away 78 women and 114 children.

Let us step away from the figures and walk in these women's shoes. What does a woman do when she has walked out of her home, away from her abuser, sought refuge and been denied it because of the failures of the Fine Gael Government, the abject, callous inaction of an inept administration? The only place that woman can go is back to that house and abuser. Is it any wonder that the figures for femicide are so high? A total of 126 women were killed in the last 32 years by a current or former partner, which is an average of four women per year. The Garda Commissioner said last week that domestic homicide is outnumbering gangland murders by two to one. Gardaí respond to 500 to 600 calls every week.

The Istanbul Convention that Ireland signed up to in 2015 and only ratified in March of this year has still not been implemented, despite what the Minister said in his opening remarks. Ireland, as a signatory to the convention, has an obligation to provide refuge spaces for victims of domestic violence. The number of refuge spaces that are provided by a state is determined by the population of the state and that brings us back again to those stark, bleak figures. There should be 472 places available, but there are only 141.

Something the Government could do to help these women and children would be to listen to the calls made this week for a new family law court in Smithfield with new facilities and services, such as specialist legal advice services, the provision of on-site legal aid and mediation services, the creation of a child-friendly environment and the provision of a sufficient number of rooms to cater for private consultations, particularly to facilitate safe spaces for people and families who are experiencing domestic violence and abusive situations.

At the invitation of one of the organisations that deals with domestic abuse, I visited Dolphin House approximately two years ago and I was appalled when I saw the conditions there. Victims of domestic violence, often accompanied by their children, were standing in a hallway one or two feet away from the people who perpetrated abuse on them because there is no space for anybody to confer with their solicitors or advisors. The commitment was made four years ago that a new family law centre would be delivered by 2020 but we are absolutely no nearer its provision.

The leniency of sentences handed down to men convicted of abusing their partners needs to be highlighted. A Women's Aid report from this year showed three in five such men get suspended sentences. Most women interviewed for the report were dissatisfied with the sentences passed down and did not believe that justice was carried out.

We need not only a properly funded and resourced family law court in Smithfield, we also need to have such courts rolled out across the country. We need a refuge in every county so that we do not have a situation like the one in Kildare where women from Carlow, Offaly and Laois and even Tipperary are trying to get into a refuge with only four apartments. We need full-time court accompaniment workers for every refuge so that front-line staff are not pulled away from their vital work when they go with women to their court appearances. Every refuge must open on a 24-hour basis. Women do not decide to leave their partners and their homes solely between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Refuges do much more than provide a place of safety. They are the foundation stones that allow women to piece their lives back together. Those lives have often been shattered by years of mental and physical abuse. Refuges help women to get their benefits, regain their financial independence - some for the first time in years - and to bring their cases to court.

We need to look at the court system and the staggering chasm between orders sought and orders granted. The future of a woman's life, her safety and the lives and safety of her children can come down to the decision of one judge. Those women have no other avenue to pursue if an order is not granted. The stress, trauma and misery visited upon them by judges who do not protect them by issuing orders against their partners who are inflicting violence upon them is unbelievable. The court system is difficult to navigate and terrifying for many women. Change needs to be made on this from the top down. We need to look at how our justice system could be a pier onto which women can alight following an arduous journey through stormy seas. It should be a haven and a place of respite. Instead of helping these women and ensuring their safety, the courts spit them back out into a cruel and pitiless world. There is so much that can be done to help these victims. The courts are a major source of trauma for women seeking to get their lives back together. If the family law system were reformed and properly resourced, it would ensure that the safety of children and the non-abusive parent are at the centre of family law proceedings where there is domestic violence.

We must reform and resource the criminal justice system to make it responsive to the needs of survivors of domestic violence. I was shocked to learn that women seeking legal aid are only entitled to one application per year. If a woman needs to go back to the courts for maintenance or access, she must wait a year to do so or pay for it herself. It is blindingly obvious that this restriction should be immediately lifted.

When the courts award supervised access, are they aware that there are no facilities for supervised access? Barnardos had such a service but, inexplicably, funding for it was cut years ago. Women have to supervise access themselves, coming back to the same situation from which they are desperately trying to escape.

I will briefly mention the impact of domestic violence on women's health. The World Health Organization states that women who have experienced domestic violence are at an increased risk of depression and suicide attempts, physical injuries, psychosomatic disorders, unplanned pregnancies, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Some 30% of women who experience domestic violence in Ireland are physically assaulted for the first time during pregnancy. Reported physical abuse included being gagged, kicked, beaten, choked, strangled, stabbed, slammed against the wall, spat on, having hair pulled, being scalded, beaten and raped while pregnant. Evidence shows that 49% of women injured by their partner's violence required medical treatment and 10% required a hospital stay.

What does it say about us as a society that these troubled, tormented, terrified women present at our so-called places of safety, our refuges and our courts? I use the word "our" because we, as a society, provide them, or in this case fail to provide them, with the security and safety they so desperately need.

Fianna Fáil is calling on the Government to allocate the necessary funding for the establishment of a dedicated family law court as a matter of urgency. The conditions in which family law and childcare cases are currently being heard are totally unsuitable and are damaging to victims. We are calling for the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, which would allocate the proper number of spaces in refuges that are required. We are calling on the Government to stop perpetuating the cycle of abuse inflicted on these women and children. I accept that are abused by their partners but in its criminal neglect of failing to provide for these women and children, the Government is not only failing to alleviate the abuse, it is practically perpetuating it.

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