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

I thank the Minister of State for his response, but on 8 March, which is International Women’s Day, there were 744 women available for sex purchase on Internet sites in this State. Somewhere between 15% and 100% of those were trafficked migrants. There remains no refuge in Dún Laoghaire. We have a massive cultural problem with this issue. It is a systemic historical cultural problem but it remains a cultural problem. Most of the women I have mentioned were killed by men they knew, men they lived with, men they were in an intimate relationship with or with whom they had had a child.

I thank the Minister of State for being here and doing this. It is not the first time he has acknowledged this with me and I am grateful. I am not completely sure, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, what the value of this is here at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, with yourself, myself, the Minister of State, Deputies Alan Farrell and Christopher O’Sullivan, along with Oireachtas staff, but there is some value over the year in doing this. My team and I certainly learned so much more about the various women, including who they were, their age, how they died, the circumstances and something of their family, where possible. It has not always been easy and I thank in particular my staff who helped with research but, more importantly, conscientiously marked the anniversaries, and there were sometimes multiple anniversaries on a given day, on my social media and allowed it to be tracked in that way. I hope we have not upset any family in doing so but it was an effort to try have these women's deaths marked beyond this House and into the community. Sometimes though, when I look at the reactions in the emails and the comments, I feel it perhaps does have significance to try to create remembrance beyond the pain of the family, which is obviously unquestioned, out in the wider community. This the same community that stood up against violence in January 2022 and will do again, I hope, in January 2023 and, indeed, every year thereafter until this scourge is no more.

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