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

I thank Deputy Coppinger for bringing forward the motion. As others have, I pay tribute to those in the Public Gallery for coming here today and for having the courage to speak up, and to advocate and campaign on this issue. Their presence is hugely important because listening to the Government and some of the contributions here, they might think that there is a very clear determination to address the scourge of gender-based violence. However, the facts as outlined in the motion and repeated by some of our contributors suggest that the Government is a long way from taking the actions necessary to address this shameful, horrendous and frightening situation. That is what these figures are.

The fact that more than half of women have suffered sexual violence either as a child or as an adult is absolutely shocking. That more than one third of them have suffered that violence at the hands of a partner is absolutely horrendous and frightening. The fact that one in four LGBT people have suffered abuse and violence and that 72% of LGBT people suffer verbal abuse is horrendous. The Natashia O'Brien case summed it up. A 24-year-old woman walking down the street, who intervened on behalf of somebody who was being subjected to homophobic abuse then herself got violently assaulted in public by somebody who did it in a way where they thought it was acceptable, then had to fight for some kind of justice in terms of the response of the State to that horrendous situation.

I hear others referring to this. We often hear - rightly so in some cases - about the treatment of women in other cultures and so on. However, our statistics are some of the worst in Europe and testify to the failure of successive Governments and our society to deal with such absolutely toxic, poisonous, dangerous and criminal violence against women, LGBT people and people based on their gender. It is absolutely horrendous.

The State does not exactly send out a good signal on the way we deal with people who have been victims of that violence, as has been referred to by others. The Minister of State sort of boasted about the 12 additional refuge places last year, which is a pitiful number, against a background where we are not even close to meeting the Istanbul Convention targets. I suspect those 12 could be in my area of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is one of the counties that did not have any refuge space at all up to very recently and where the Istanbul Convention would require 48 places just in that county. There was a recommendation for 24 but what we have actually got is 12. Of course, they are massively oversubscribed. There is no prioritisation for women suffering domestic violence when they have to leave their home and find themselves homeless. I have even had cases of women who went into a refuge and were then evicted from the refuge after a number of months and put into emergency accommodation. If that is the sort of signal the State sends out about how much it cares about the victims of this violence, it hardly sends a good signal about the seriousness of the State to deal with it.

I want to deal briefly with the issue of the notes of the counselling sessions. This is one observation on top of the other ones. Are this issue and the low numbers of people taking cases not connected? A tiny number of victims of gender-based violence actually go to the State to seek justice precisely because of things like that. Why would they if the notes used in counselling and therapy could be handed over and then made public? It is an active disincentive to seek justice or to seek the therapy someone needs after the traumatising experience of being a victim of such violence.

See this speech in context