Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

First, there are no words that can make this okay for Ashling Murphy and those who knew and loved her. I express, once again, my party's sympathies and solidarity with her family and all who knew and loved Ashling. I hope that our collective outpouring of grief and anger as a nation following her killing provides some modicum of solace to them in the horrendously difficult days, months and time ahead.

For women all over Ireland, I hear how frustrating and heartbreaking it is to have the same conversations over and over again and yet see little progress when it comes to ending violence against women. When it comes to political leadership, this Dáil Chamber has failed them for decades. We have had broken promises and abandoned strategies, flashy signs held up to the Istanbul Convention followed by an abject failure to increase refuge spaces. It is has been said time and time again today that we still only have one third of the recommended refuge spaces and nine counties do not have any refuge at all.

Today, we must clearly say that politicians will stand up and provide the top-down political leadership required to create a zero-tolerance culture to end men's violence against women because too many women are living in fear in their homes and in our communities. Too many women are being killed by men.

The safety tips that women so unhelpfully receive include: do not go out after dark, do not jog with earphones in and make it legal to carry mace. None of this makes a difference because women are not the problem and while society obsesses about the movements and behaviour of women, we allow the behaviour and acts of perpetrators to go unremarked upon and, too often, unpunished.

To end men's violence against women, we must accept that the perpetrators of gender-based violence are socialised by the sexism and masculinity that typifies our everyday relations and, in turn, institutionalises sexism and culture. It is crucial to understand that while not all men commit violence, it is usually always a man who is the perpetrator.

Men's violence against women operates on a spectrum. It starts with what may seem like harmless banter with sexist jokes and it ends with women afraid and hurt in relationships, with random attacks and harassment of women in the street, and with women being killed.

Violence against women is not an issue that will go away without a concerted focus being put into the protection of women, prosecution of perpetrators and, of course, prevention of violence in the first place. Much more needs to be done by the State to ensure that women and their children are safe in Ireland.

We need leadership at the top level. I want to reference some of that. We talked about the issue of having one Department with responsibility for ending men's violence against women and one Minister responsible sitting around the Cabinet table. I was thinking about some of the Cabinet Ministries as others were speaking and about where there is an overlap. I am talking about some of the issues that have arisen and have been raised with Deputies across this Chamber over the past number of years. Even if you throw a stick in the air and it comes down, when you think about arts, for example, we have had the Waking the Feminists movement. In the area of defence, we have seen the Women of Honour group stand up and hold to account those who treated them most horrendously wrong. In transport, who among us here did not feel sick when we watched last year a young women getting onto the DART and having a kick aimed at her head by a group of young men? In social protection, for decades motherhood has become the basis of a woman's poverty - a form of institutional violence that should be intolerable in a 21st century republic. In the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, we had a debate only before this on the legacy of mother and baby homes. We see the horrendous injustice of the State and start to see it replicated elsewhere. That continues today in direct provision.

Education is somewhere where we can intervene with young men very early on. That starts with the means by which we teach them. A couple of months ago, my party brought forward the Education (Health, Relationships and Sex Education) Bill 2021. We hope this legislation will make a difference in how we teach children about how they interact in relation to consent and confronting the issue of toxic masculinity from a very early age. It was lamentable that the Bill was put back, although People Before Profit had a Bill several years ago that was similar. These are issues that we can address immediately and we can get ahead of this.

There are other issues. We talked about leadership at the top level. I also want to talk about the role of local authorities. My party rightly referenced the Istanbul Convention, but there was also a UN safer cities for woman and young girls initiative that placed a responsibility on local authorities to improve public infrastructure to make cities and towns safer for women and young girls as they interact with them. That was about confronting dereliction, looking at street lighting and having public awareness campaigns on public transport, etc. That all needs to be funded. That report is there from 2017, I believe, and all across the country local authorities still have done nothing to address these issues. If we are to have a concerted effort, everybody in a position of responsibility and leadership in this country needs to ask what we can do better and commit to doing. That starts with ourselves as men, and that has been touched on, quite rightly, across the Chamber. There is a multitude of things that we can do quickly, and should do.

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