Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. I thank Sinn Féin for putting this Bill down and it is very good news that the Government will not oppose it. That is welcome. We have talked about this subject frequently in the recent past, notably in relation to Covid and the huge spike in domestic violence incidents, and people and families seeking refuge in difficult circumstances. We also talked about it in relation to the abuse images we saw recently and which we will deal with next week when the Bill goes to Committee Stage.

This Bill is different, insofar as it is a workers' rights issue. That is important because of all the aspects of, in particular, women's lives that a violent relationship seeks to control, whether it concerns who they see, who their friends are, when they see their family, what they eat, what they wear or how they spend their time. A huge amount of coercive control and questioning goes on around when they leave the home to go to work. The workplace should be a place where they are guaranteed they can be safe and I heard Deputy McDonald's illustration of that lack of safety. It is also a place where she - I use the word "she" rather than "them" because it is overwhelmingly women and their children who are affected by this - gets economic independence from an abusive or violent relationship. That economic independence is paramount and to lose that will drive the individual further into depression, anxiety and a sense of lack of self-worth. Her job would be under threat if she took leave due to domestic violence. The Bill is very important in that sense. It protects the rights of workers to have leave to deal with the fallout from a traumatic experience in life.

The other aspect of the trauma that this House needs to address urgently is the question of housing and alternative safe accommodation for families who have to leave a violent situation. As it stands, homeless services do not recognise domestic abuse as an emergency and a family is not entitled to immediate choices of alternative accommodation because there is a violent issue in the background. I had a good friend who retired early from servicing the courts with women who had to seek barring orders precisely because she felt desperate that each day she was driving victims back into the arms of their abusers because there was no alternative accommodation for them. We need to address that urgently.

As has been said, there is a wider issue in our society about how women are regarded and why violence against women is so prevalent, often leading to murder and very serious consequences. That wider national campaign around domestic violence and gender equality has to begin. We have a huge duty in this House to make sure that it happens and that we educate future generations around the issues of control, violence and, in particular, consent and rape. Here the House has an obligation. In January, we will come to the second anniversary of the implementation of the Bill as a consequence of repealing the eighth amendment. There were two particular recommendations in that. One was to work towards the availability of free contraception. Probably even more important was the question of having non-ethos-based sex education in our schools. Deputy Paul Murphy will speak to that because he had a Bill before the House on that issue.

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We need to move towards non-ethos-based sex education urgently. Otherwise, we will have no impact on a toxic culture in which a whole cohort of our population believe they have permission to abuse and be violent towards women.

This is an important Bill on workers' rights. We welcome it and will support it all the way.

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