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

I am glad the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, and Deputy Gannon highlighted the #NotAllMen movement that emerged last week because it is all women, and all women all the time. It has to be called out. Any of those men who were unwise enough to have their little feelings hurt in the context of the debate last week can just take a hike or spend that time thinking about how they can make the women in their community feel safer today and every day.

I want to take a moment to put on the record of the House a few names that should be remembered this month: Joyce Quinn, Miriam O'Donohue, Mandy Smyth, Gráinne Dillon, Jean Scanlon, Marie Bridgeman, Dolores McCrea, Amy Farrell, Rebecca Kinsella, Marioara Rostas, Anne Corcoran, Loredana Pricajan, Breda Waters, Veronica Vollrath, Rudo Mawere, Jane Braidwood, Jasmine McMonagle, Elżbieta Piotrowska, Urantsetseg Tserendorj, Sharon Bennett and Ashling Murphy. Those are the names of 21 women we know of who lost their lives needlessly and at the hands of a man during the month of January in the past 27 years. Reading about each of these women over the past few days, it was again clear that it does not matter what your job is, what precautions you take, what time you are out at, how bright it is or if you are in your own home. By simply existing, women's lives are at risk from men whom they know and men whom they do not know. They are at risk of being strangled to death or being stabbed not once but numerous times, often with a bread knife and in their own home. From my reading, those were the two most common ways of taking a woman's life that kept appearing across the years for those 21 women.

In my reading, I came across a piece by a person referred to only as "Ita" called "The Killing Fields of Ireland" in response to femicide that year. She wrote "And women of all ages die at the hands of men they have known, the hands of men who have fathered their children and men they have shared drinks with in the pub." That piece was written in December 1997, a quarter of a century ago, yet here we stand in 2022 having the same conversation, experiencing the same atrocities, losing more lives. Nothing seems to have changed.

I have a deep concern that, as we move out of the Covid period, when front-line services tell us that attacks at home are more frequent and severe, we will hear more about this issue in the coming years. Women continue to pay for being women with their lives, most often at the hands of those whom they know. Women pay for being a woman in lots of other ways - financially, physically, culturally and through daily fear, one which is low grade but constant and ever present. When we speak up, as we so often do, on many aspects of our lives, it is often dismissed, consciously or unconsciously, as "Ah, the women". Well, no more. The reality that this House has to face is that this must change entirely.

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