Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Those who experience gender-based violence, mainly women, should get a big helping hand but instead the State stacks the odds against them. If you have rung 999 in recent years, the Garda might have cancelled your call and ignored your plea for help.

If you try to leave the family home, you are confronted by a housing crisis and a shortage of refuge places. If you try to achieve financial independence, you are hemmed in by low pay and childcare costs. The society of the mother and baby homes and of the Magdalen laundries is in the past, but the attitudes that underlay them still live on. The system is not fair. It has misogyny in its DNA. I find it incredible that the only person in the entire State facing prosecution under the Covid laws for being an alleged event organiser is a woman who organised a small stand-out on the streets against femicide and gender-based violence, Aislinn O'Keeffe from Limerick, a member of the socialist feminist group ROSA. In March, she organised a stand-out in the aftermath of the Sarah Everard murder. The stand-out was socially distanced and attended by ten people wearing masks. She was fined €500, but she refused to pay and is now awaiting a court summons. Her case says a lot about the system. It is a case that should now be dropped.

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