Lisa McDonald (Fianna Fail)

The Minister of State, Deputy White, is very welcome. I was delighted by her appointment and hope it will be the dawn of a new era of equality for women in Ireland. I have found the varied and measured contributions to the debate very interesting. I was supposed to speak at the start of the debate, but I had to attend a meeting with the Minister for Transport. I thank Senator Corrigan for speaking in my place. We were given some good news today for a change. The news about the south-east rescue service is to be welcomed. I am delighted to have heard the speeches of many Senators and apologise for missing the Minister of State's, although I went through her script quickly.

When one considers the number of women involved in business and leadership roles, it is clear that a patriarchal system is embedded in Irish culture. Politics is a glaring example of this. Historically, Ireland's legal system has been hostile to cases of domestic violence. We have to acknowledge that the number of convictions for domestic violence, by comparison with the number of people who come forward, is affected by a huge rate of attrition. We have come a long way from the old repressed Ireland which had a hostile legal climate. That the victims of sexual violence found it difficult to come forward has been clearly demonstrated in the horrific stories we have heard of late. We should honestly admit that we have known about the victims of clerical child sexual abuse for some time.

We need to examine the nature of sexual violence if we are to ascertain why women find it so difficult to come forward. The Listowel rape case which came before the courts in December 2009 demonstrated again the difficulties encountered by female victims of sexual violence. It is worrying that the victim in the case was clearly targeted as a villain in her community. I am concerned about some of the statistics in this regard. For every 100 cases of sexual violence reported in Ireland, there is a fall-off in 95 cases and just five cases result in a conviction. That is the attrition rate we are dealing with. We have an awful long way to go.

I was very excited when the Cosc report was launched by the Minister. However, my excitement waned when I read it because it is full of jargon. It is okay and grand. There is nothing wrong with it. It sets out how we will deal with aspects of domestic violence, other than those covered by the Domestic Violence Act 1996, until 2014. Various non-governmental organisations such as Women's Aid are doing tremendous and super work in this area. Will we have to wait until after 2014 for the law in this area to be augmented or improved? If that is the case, it is not acceptable. We need to do better in this area. We have been calling for a debate on domestic violence since 2007 and it has taken three years for it to be arranged. Progress has been slow. I do not think anyone will jump up and down and say it is the most amazing thing ever.

I wish to hone in on a couple of aspects of this issue such as the lacunae in the law. One can seek a safety order or a barring order under the Domestic Violence Act 1996. If one wants to obtain a safety order, one has to have been cohabiting for six of the previous 12 months. If one leaves the house and tries to secure a conviction thereafter, one has six months in which to do so. The timeframes and the cohabitation rules are wrong and missing the point. We are talking about men and women who have suffered violence. I do not want to get involved in a debate on whether more women or men are affected by domestic violence, although I accept that women are more vulnerable. Men are involved also. I will deal with that aspect of the issue.

The fact of the matter is that our definitions are bad. They do not get into the nitty-gritty of what is domestic violence. The cohabitation rule needs to be amended. I welcome the Ministers statement that he intends to use the Civil Partnership Bill 2009 to do so. However, that raises other issues. Do we need a cohabitation rule at all? Why have we put in place the provision, whereby people need to be in a committed relationship? This provision may act as an additional barrier to women seeking safety orders or may be used by abusers to prevent them from being deemed eligible for such orders. As a practising family law solicitor, I find it very frustrating that I cannot help people whose relationships do not fit within the requisite timeframe or the legislative definition.

As someone who has dealt with the issue of domestic violence from two sides - as a politician and as a lawyer - I hear far worse stories as a politician than I do as a lawyer. I do not believe women are coming forward to use the framework available to them under the Domestic Violence Act 1996. They are far more likely to contact local politicians to ask what they can do. It is devastating that those who look for safety orders and barring orders tend to be those whose cases are at the lower end of the scale. I am sure Cosc can back this up with statistics. I do not mean to diminish the abuse they have suffered. As many are not seeking help, many perpetrators of violence are going free without having the rigour of the law applied to them. When it is applied, the law applied is bad.

I do not like the phrase "domestic violence". It needs to be changed because the crimes of rape and sexual abuse do not seem to be covered by it. Members of the Garda are not trained to be in a position to deal with such violence. Senator Norris mentioned the most telling statistic in this regard - that just one marital rape conviction has been secured in the last 20 years. We are not getting to the real story. Until we face up to this crime, we will never truly have equality in Ireland. We need to state clearly that it is wrong to beat up, rape, physically abuse, mentally abuse or torture a member of one's family in any way. I refer to abuse by economic means, for example. Given that domestic violence is experienced in one in five families, what proportion of the population as a whole have to tolerate it? If it can be said women in one in five families have suffered some form of domestic abuse, bearing in mind that they comprise 50% of the population, I suggest between 15% and 20% of the population are dealing with this problem at any given time. People are not coming forward because they seem to think it is okay, or a part of life. That is why I am saying we need to get into the nitty-gritty of it.

I am worried that the Cosc report is not good enough. We need to change the law immediately. I welcome the Minister's commitment to examine the possibility of using the Civil Partnership Bill 2009 to extend eligibility for safety orders. Given that 95% of cases of rape do not result in a conviction, we need to consider deeply the issues of justice and accountability to ascertain where we are going wrong. I am not sure we are doing this. Approximately 12 years ago research in the United Kingdom found that one in three people was suffering from domestic violence. They had statistics to prove that such violence was leading to homicide in the home and took action on foot of this. The UK model is one we should examine. The United Kingdom has introduced 122 specialist domestic violence courts across the country. We would not need that many, but these courts have been phenomenally successful, with a conviction rate of 70% which compares with a rate here of 6%. The difference is stark. The British are going about this in a far better way. They have the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 which deals with the problem of people being trafficked into the country and forced to marry.

I spoke today to a journalist about a Filipino girl in Wexford who is going home tomorrow to the Philippines because she suffered domestic abuse. She had no recourse under the law and could not go to the Garda. Women who are members of the Traveller community or ethnic minorities are not as inclined to come forward under our law to seek redress. There are also issues in the immigration Bill that need to be addressed, but I do not have the time to go into them.