Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Bacik. I would certainly be very open to working with her on bringing forward legislation, which would be quite a discrete piece of legislation. As she said, we had a debate in the Seanad yesterday about the mass abduction of a reported 234 and possibly as many as 300 schoolgirls in the rural village of Chibok in north-eastern Nigeria by the militant Islamic extremist organisation, Boko Haram. Senators were given five minutes to make a statement and, as I said in my intervention, it was nearly impossible to bring any substance to such an important issue in such a limited time. The issues are extremely complex and extend far beyond what immediately appears relevant. To understand how best to tackle kidnapping, it is necessary to understand the genesis of Boko Haram and its five year reign of terror in north-east Nigeria. Issues pertaining to economic drivers, corruption, bad governance, state violence and external radical religious ideology sit side by side with prevailing acts of violence against women, gender based violence and breaches of women's reproductive health and rights worldwide.

I call on the Leader to facilitate a full debate on violence against women and gender based violence. I know this is something the Minister of State, Deputy Costello, would welcome also, and it would be good if we could have a wider debate on this issue. There are lessons for Ireland to learn and actions that Ireland can take. I would like to use this opportunity to acknowledge that yesterday marked the launch in Ireland of the global rights campaign "I Decide". The campaign was launched by the IFPA and calls on world leaders to support women's and girl's basic sexual and reproductive rights. "I Decide" focuses on four key rights of all women and girls across the world: the right to decide what happens to their bodies and who to share their life with; the size of their family; whether to have children and, if so, when and how many children; and the right to decide their future. The "I Decide" campaign is calling for sexual and reproductive health rights to be central to the new development framework which will replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015, and aims to collect 1 million signatures to present to UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, in the summer of 2015. Mine will certainly be one of those signatures.

I note the Leader has proposed we discuss the motion on the joint committee of inquiry into the banking crisis this evening, which I will certainly support. Both personally and on behalf of my group colleagues, individually and collectively, I would like to propose that Senator Seán Barrett be nominated as one of the two Senators to this group given his-----