Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I want to focus on the issue of sexual violence.

6 o’clock

Figures I obtained recently show a shocking increase in the level of sexual violence in Ireland in recent years. While the figures were down marginally in 2020 because of Covid-19, between 2016 and 2019 there was a massive increase. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, recorded 2,520 sexual offences in 2016. That figure increased to 3,340 in 2019. There was a huge increase in the numbers of cases of rape, abuse of children under the age of 17 and sexual assaults. There must be a serious national conversation regarding the underlying reasons for this increase and how we can best respond.

This week also brought unbelievable information from the CSO in the context of the sexual assault figures it published. More than one in five, over 20%, of those who committed sexual assaults were boys under the age of 18. That is a startling and incredible figure. Even more startling than that is the fact that three in five victims of sexual assault, or 60%, were children. In this generation, children under the age of 18 are the most vulnerable in this State regarding this type of sexual crime.

It is an incredible situation, and an issue that the country is not dealing with. On the news, the CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said that one of the driving forces behind this increase in abuse by youths of youths is the amount of hardcore Internet pornography being consumed by individuals at a very young age. I have raised this issue several times and when I do the Government frets over it. Heads are shaken, but at the end of the conversation shoulders are shrugged. No party in this Dáil has introduced legislation to end the ability of children as young as ten years of age to access hardcore Internet pornography. That is except for one party, namely, Aontú. I have a Bill waiting to move to Second Stage. If passed, that legislation would make it illegal for international companies to make a profit out of selling hardcore pornography to children as young as ten years of age. I really encourage the Government to help to get the Bill through the Dáil. This is far too serious an issue for people to ignore.

I also wish to discuss sentencing, which is important when it comes to sexual violence. In 2019, a man was sentenced to a mere two and a half years in prison for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. In 2015, another perpetrator was given a suspended sentence of a year for the repeated rape and sexual assault of his girlfriend while she was asleep over the course of 12 months. When the judge was handing down the sentence, he credited that perpetrator for confessing and allowing the case to be brought forward. In February, a former drug dealer was given a fully suspended sentence despite sexually assaulting a woman. In another case, a man was given the opportunity to be spared a criminal conviction for the sexual assault of two women if he gave a donation of €100 to the rape crisis centre. These sentences are disgracefully weak. They do not represent justice for the victims and they are definitely not a reason for future perpetrators to be afraid of the law. We must do much better by victims.

I also want to talk briefly about some of the criminal aspects introduced by the Government in respect of Covid-19. Covid-19 is obviously a real issue and it is a dangerous illness for certain cohorts, especially the elderly and those who are ill. The Government has done a poor job of providing protection in the context of the restrictions and laws which it has introduced in the past year. According to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, since March 2020 the Oireachtas has enacted four statutes and the Minister for Health has made 67 sets of regulations in response to Covid-19. These include 40 weeks of bans on religious services, 410 days of wet pubs being closed and more than 215 days of workplace closures. This adds up to the longest and most severe lockdown in Europe and one of the longest and most severe on the planet. The IHREC report published in February was damning in its assessment of how the Government has responded to Covid-19. It declared that:

... the State has repeatedly blurred the boundary between legal requirements and public health guidance, generating widespread confusion about the extent of people’s legal obligations. This offends the rule of law, disrespects people’s [freedoms] and, in several specific respects, breaches standards of national and international law.

That is a shocking indictment of the Government actions over the past while.

One of the worst examples of the suppression of human rights has been that relating to religious services. Ireland is currently the only state in the European Union in which religious services are banned. We are one of a few countries on the planet, including Saudi Arabia and Korea, where religious services are banned. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this is a human right. The Government has stated that it intends a return to religious services at some stage, perhaps at the end of May, at the same time as people return to attending museums and galleries. Attendance at museums and galleries is important, but they are not in the same place as a right specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For the Government to value these in the same way shows a massive disrespect for the well over 1 million people in this State for whom religious practice is an essential element of their lives.

Before Christmas, the Minister for Health said that religious services would not be criminalised. He stood up here in the Dáil and said that. However, representatives of the State stood up in the High Court last week to confirm that saying mass is now a criminal offence. A priest in Cavan was fined for saying mass, while a Protestant minister in Dublin was arrested for organising a religious service. It was unclear exactly what they were being charged with. Oran Doyle, a law professor in Trinity College Dublin has said that under the Government's new Covid-19 lockdown rules, holding outdoor religious services-----

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