Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The murder of Ashling Murphy was an absolutely unspeakable and horrific act. I can only imagine the grief the family must be feeling. I pass on my deepest sympathies to her family, her friends and her community.

Against that background of an utterly unspeakable senseless murder and tragedy, it has been very heartening to see the amazing response of people throughout the country, coming out on vigils and insisting we must address the reasons our society continues to produce this phenomenon of violence against and murder of women because they are women. Violence of any description needs to be stamped out, but violence against women and the murder of women because they are women is a particularly horrendous thing.

On the vigils, it was brilliant how so many people were saying that of course the wheels of justice will have to grind out an explanation and a punishment in the individual case, but everybody insisted we must also look at ourselves and our society to ask how it is our society continues to produce this phenomenon. I certainly do not have all the answers, and I do not believe any individual does, but there are a few things we can say.

There is an urgency demanded by people in addressing this phenomenon and for taking measures to stamp this out and to change the culture - whatever it is about our society that produces this violence - to get to the root of it quickly and change things. Some of these have already been alluded to. First of all, if a woman is in such a relationship, and given we know most domestic violence takes place among people who know each other and in the family home, it is self-evident that if she has nowhere to go, cannot get out of where she lives, and therefore does not have the ability to escape violence, there is a greater likelihood the violence could end up with tragic consequences. It is a matter of absolute urgency we provide the refuge places.

I am aware that in my area there is no women's refuge in the whole of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. The Government has now committed to it, but it is worth saying that people have been talking about it and campaigning for a refuge in Dún Laoghaire for as long as I have been in representative politics since I was first elected as a councillor, which was 12 or 13 years ago. We still do not have a refuge.

It is not just about refuge spaces, however. It is also about alternative accommodation and the housing situation more generally. I will highlight one issue with Minister, which is that, even now, of the cases I am dealing with this minute, there are women in domestic violence situations who cannot leave those situations because they are joint tenants with their partners and therefore there are bureaucratic obstacles to them getting onto the housing list due to them already being tenants. This means they do not want to leave the house even though they are in a situation of domestic violence. This is crazy. Those barriers must be removed. As long as we have a housing crisis and until we address it, women will be left trapped in these violent or abusive situations.

The other aspect is the question of objective sex education. I do not have all the answers for where this came from, but in Irish society the State for much of its history prevented people from having divorce and getting out of bad relationships. The State also did not want women to have control over their own bodies. We have had the horrific organised institutional abuse of women and children in the Magdalen laundries and the mother and baby homes. Against that background, it is crazy that religious institutions with particular views of women, sexuality and so on, still control 90% of our schools, and have any control whatsoever of the sex education that is taught to our young people.

That issue has to be addressed as a matter of urgency so that people get factual and objective sex education, and we do not have religious bodies that are not giving people the proper education they need running our schools.

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