Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Social Democrats for tabling this motion. We in the Labour Party had a similar motion last week. As others have mentioned, Natasha O’Brien is here. It would be unfair for anybody in the Opposition to suggest that the Minister has not been active in this area since her appointment as Minister for Justice. I ask her to continue to do so. However, it is true that there are nine counties without domestic violence refuges. In fact, more than half of the refuges we have are full, and that has to be addressed. One of the calls that Natasha has made is that because of the nature of the interaction she had that led to the entire case - it was one of homophobic abuse - she is adamant that hate crime legislation be pursued by this Government. I hope the Government is still serious about that, as many of us in the Opposition are also serious about that issue.

I wish to make three points. Many of them are about culture. I wish to talk initially about the Judiciary. When the troika was here, a number of controversial suggestions were made about the nature of Irish society and how reforms had to be made, and many of them were deeply unpopular. The troika - the IMF - made wide-ranging suggestions about the Judiciary in Ireland and how it is organised. They were not acted upon and I always wonder why. Is it because the Judiciary and legal system in Ireland are viewed to be so powerful, influential or untouchable that they cannot be reformed? If anybody ever steps inside a courtroom in this country, they feel like they just walked onto the movie set of a period drama from the 19th century. I think that is part of the issue here. I refer to the attitude of deference, the outdated language, the outdated costumes, the way they interact with each other, the fact that such a huge number of them are intertwined or interconnected, and even how they address each other. A massive degree of reform has to happen within our Judiciary and legal system so that we have a legal system that is reflective of modern Irish life. I do not think the type of sentences being passed down are in any way reflective of modern life. Having said that, it is true that the criminal barristers are having days of action. They had one yesterday, they will have one next week and they will have one in two weeks’ time because of issues of fees that have not been restored to them. That is affecting certain cases, including a case of rape last year that was not able to be pursued because of the inability of the court to sit because of the lack of a senior counsel, as I understand.

My second point is about sporting bodies, in response to the “RTÉ Investigates” and Sunday Independent investigation that was unveiled on Sunday. I give credit to Olivia O’Toole, the former Irish football international, who I know well. It was her tweet from 2021 that led to the investigation and uncovering of the level of abuse that was shown on our screens on Sunday night. She was frozen out of the Irish international side. She was probably the best player we ever produced. A genuinely world-class player was frozen out of the Irish international side because of what she witnessed and the attitude she had towards those in power.

Deputy Ivana Bacik and I said yesterday - we got a good response, in fairness, from the Taoiseach - that there needs to be a mechanism from the Department of sport, possibly led by an independent person, that would open up a mechanism for people to come forward to say what they may have experienced in sporting bodies over the years. It was only because Olivia tweeted this, and only because Marie Crowe and Mark Tighe pressed some buttons, that people came forward. The women thought they were on their own; they did not realise there was a general problem. If we were to do that, we would probably unearth other issues of abuse in other sporting codes. We have to allow that mechanism to take place and to start. When Deputy Ivana Bacik raised this with the Taoiseach yesterday, he said it was an excellent idea. It should be pursued. However, this is reactive stuff. This is always reactive. We react constantly to a case, a particular issue and the unearthing of abuse.

I will probably not have many more opportunities to interact with the Minister of State over the coming period of time. However, I wish to talk about something I feel strongly about, which is the nature of gender equality in Ireland. Whenever this debate happens, I always raise this and I often get criticised for it. Outside of the Arab world and Malta, Ireland has the highest rate of gender segregation in the education system. Nobody separates boys and girls in our school system more than the Irish outside of Malta and the Arab world. Some 17% of Irish primary school children go to single-gender primary schools. One third of our secondary schools are gender segregated. We have a huge obsession with separating boys and girls in our schools. What I will inevitably get, as I always do, is an email or correspondence from somebody saying that they went to an all-boys or all-girls school and they would never act the way these terrible people have acted. However, it does not help to lead to a culture of genuine understanding of the nature of gender equality, the experiences of girls and the experiences of boys when the State oversees a situation where girls go into one school and boys go into another school. It is weird and odd. It does not stand up to any scrutiny at all.

The Department of Education has not given sanction to a new single-gender school since 1998. It has effectively for the past 25 years been State policy not to separate children on the basis of gender, yet we still have it. The separation of children might be more of an urban phenomenon in terms of primary schooling, but the number of single-gender secondary schools we have is an oddity in the European and almost a global context. Parents are voting with their feet. In my constituency, a number of schools are beginning to amalgamate and change their enrolment practices. Certainly, the Department of Education has to look at this and say that if we are serious about building a culture of respect between boys and girls and men and women, we can no longer have this education system that is so determined to keep them separate, because it leads to problems.

It does not lead, necessarily, to every single past pupil of any individual school doing the types of things which have caused such upset in the recent past, but it certainly does not help. The Department of Education needs to take that on and take it seriously.

The three main points are that the Judiciary needs to be reformed, we need to open up a mechanism for victims of abuse in the sporting context to come forward, and we need to do something about gender segregation in schools.

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