Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I warmly welcome the tabling of these statements and the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I strongly support the very direct words of the Taoiseach in his opening remarks to victims of domestic violence - largely women, as well as some children and men - who, right now, are suffering, that people are there to listen. People are there to respond. Collectively, we should send that message to people who are in desperate straits right now.

One of the greatest concerns many of us had at that outset of the lockdown was the potential for the increase in unseen acts of abuse and domestic violence within the home environment. I am afraid that those concerns, not only in Ireland but across the globe, have proven to be well founded. The Women's Aid report has shown that the Covid-19 pandemic and measures introduced to combat it had "an unprecedented and exhausting impact" on victims of domestic abuse. "Exhausting" is a very important word. The victims were ground down and exhausted by the confinement and the constant abuse. Women's Aid reported a 43% increase in contacts with its services and 30,000 disclosures of domestic violence, including almost 6,000 related to children.

One of the issues the Taoiseach referenced was coercive control. That is something that we debated a lot during the passage of the Domestic Violence Act 2018. We defined it in section 39 of that Act. There was concern that there would not be prosecutions because it is do difficult to prove coercive control in court, but there have been. I commend An Garda Síochána and its specialist units on following such cases up. The belittling abuse and control of people's lives, and women's lives, by and large, by coercive men is a shocking destruction of the quality and value of people's lives that must be rooted out.

As others have mentioned, we are hugely dependent on the voluntary groups to organise shelters and refuges for women and their children who are caught up in domestic violence. We need to do better. We are building units. I am very familiar with the one in my home town of Wexford. It is a brand new unit that is currently under construction. There is a fundraising effort to fit it out. The so-called "Three Amigos", Alan Corcoran, Fr. Sean Devereux and Pádraig Murphy, spent the month of May running every day to collect money to provide basic equipment. That should not be the case. I applaud and commend the voluntary effort that sustains it and all the organisers that are involved in providing it, but it is time for the State to step in and ensure that proper refuges are provided as a matter of course and are available to anybody caught in such dreadful situations.

I must make mention of the Garda response. The tremendously good work done by the specialist units and Operation Faoiseamh and so on has been fundamentally undermined by the report that 14,000 emergency domestic violence calls were cancelled. Quite frankly, that is just beyond belief. Retired assistant commissioner, Pat Leahy, whom I think is held in high regard by most of us, said that it was likely that vulnerable people suffered as a result. That is certainly a statement of truth. I cannot begin to imagine the double trouble trauma of enduring domestic violence, being in fear, getting the courage to reach out and dial 999, finding the space to do that, and to get no response. Garda representatives were quite understandably flabbergasted by it. How could it happen? It is the basic job and responsibility of An Garda Síochána to respond to such situations. Many members were genuinely flabbergasted at that situation. The full facts must be disclosed, because we have gone through it with other major issues. Some 1.4 million breath tests were recorded that never happened. They were bogus. It was a massive fraud. There were 146,000 people taken to court and 14,700 were wrongly convicted of motoring offences because there were issues with the fixed-charge penalty notice system. They were all scandals of the minute. What ever happened? What accountability has been brought about in these scandals? Each time a new shocking issue arises, the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commissioner say that they are hugely disturbing and fundamentally unacceptable. Yet, they reoccur. This time, on this issue, let us have the full facts of how it happened. This House should demand that.

In my final minute, I wish to make brief mention of the family courts. Thein camerarule has great importance and should be maintained, but it means that there is an awful lot going on in the domestic situation that is not known to the public. Last November, the Law Society held a conference on child and family law. Some of its discussion was fundamentally informing. One practitioner, Joan O'Mahony, talked about not being able to learn about the facts of domestic violence at university. She said that we need a more realistic assessment of what has been going on in relationships before we offer separation or divorce. These are matters to which we need to return, because they are of such fundamental importance to many of our citizens who are suffering.

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