Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not share the sentiments of Deputy Mattie McGrath in relation to Deputy Eoghan Murphy. He is like a well-placed product who has come in on three occasions to sell a message on the lifting of lockdown. In the context of this debate, I think it is a misuse of the time. He was part of a Government that failed to deal with domestic violence, failed to prioritise it and failed to provide enough shelters. Perhaps he might have addressed all those issues today. That would have been welcome to me as a woman and an Independent Deputy.

I welcome the Minister for Justice's written speech, as always. I welcome the layout of it and I accept her bona fides when she says she is giving this priority. The first District Court order by video link and the first conviction under the Domestic Violence Act 2018 are very welcome. I welcome that the audit will be published and the Minister has given a date for that in March. That is all positive.

The figures are truly horrifying. I have less than two and a half minutes so I will not go into them. Without a doubt, they increased during Covid. The victims are predominantly women and children. However, any government that is seriously interested in dealing with domestic violence must provide sufficient refuges. That is simple so I would like to have seen the Minister deal with that today in her speech in the first instance. Different measures are used but, taking the measure in favour of the Government, we are still short of 45 refuges for women. If we take another figure, we are 350 refuges short. That is number one. We cannot talk about dealing with domestic violence unless we have a sufficient number of safe places for women to go to. They can be multifunctional. When we have dealt with domestic violence, those refuges can be used for something else in the future so it is money well spent.

I will conclude by talking about the cost of domestic violence.

I am glad that we have moved on from the term "domestic incidents". These are serious assaults and crimes and we should be talking about them as such. A conservative estimate of their cost is more than €2.3 billion per year. I would like to see a cost-benefit analysis or some other analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office or another group showing what domestic violence is costing us.

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