Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister, and Deputy O’Reilly also for introducing this very important piece of legislation and its contribution to the debate that we are having again and again about domestic violence and how we try to approach and stop it. It is obvious and clear that victims need to be given the time to assess their situation and to determine a plan in their own best interests and those of their children. They may need to move house or schools and, if they are going to stay where they are, they need to develop a safety plan. They may need to take steps to improve supports around them because not every partner leaves. Some people choose to stay and we also have to respect that but we need to provide support for them.

We are beginning to see some cultural change on this as well as some change in our courts and legal proceedings in convictions and assessments. We have had two convictions for coercive control, one in Donegal and one in Dublin, and a five-year barring order for coercive control in Clare. Within my own constituency of Dún Laoghaire one of my constituents asked me to put on the record that she has received a no access recommendation from a section 47 assessor in a family law case, where the issues of control were at the core of the case. This was something that I honestly wondered if I would ever see when I made my maiden speech in the Dáil. It is an extraordinary change and will give confidence to other people who are looking for that type of recommendation in a very controlling situation. I am not the only person surprised. Caitriona Gleeson from SAFE Ireland expressed her surprise at a recent Law Society family law conference, as she also wondered if she would ever see a conviction for coercive control in her lifetime and now we have had two.

The next thing that we really need to watch especially over the Christmas period is the use by perpetrators of welfare checks to continue to exert control. That occurs in a situation where the victim has left the partner but the partner continues to use the offices of an Garda to check on the welfare of the child, causing enormous distress and disruption to the family. This can often happen during the Christmas period and indeed on Christmas Day. This needs to be watched carefully.

We keep focusing, correctly, on the response of the State, in bringing in this legislation, with multi-annual funding, and with the family law that I have mentioned, all of which we need to do. At the end of the day this is about perpetrators at home beating the bejesus out of their partners, whether physically or emotionally. We have to call it out and it simply has to stop. The State can only do so much and we must get across on a cultural basis that one cannot exert oneself in a controlling or physical way on any other person. The only way to address this on an intergenerational is through relationship and sexual education. I drop my son to school and I do not want to be like other parents looking around and wondering who in the next generation are going to be the abused and who are going to be the abusers.

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