Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will refer briefly to three things this morning. The first is to welcome the announcement by the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Flanagan, that the Government has agreed to advise our President, Michael D. Higgins, to exercise his constitutional right to grant a pardon to Maolra Seoighe from the Mám Trasna murders. That is a very positive, significant move. I look forward to the programme that is going out on TG4 on Wednesday, 4 April. It will unveil some of the things that happened around that time. It speaks to several different things and the importance of our language, the Irish language, and what happened there. I welcome that move by the Minister for Justice and Equality.

It is with a heavy heart that I go on the Easter break. I listened to Sister Stanislaus Kennedy talking this morning about the increase in the homelessness figure. Sometimes we have a lot of banter in here and the other House about political perceptions and all that but what really brought it home to me was her saying that there is an abject Government failure in dealing with the housing crisis. I know that she would not say that lightly. She is a woman of great integrity and experience and she said it happened either through inability or failure, in that the Government did not care in terms of the provision of housing and preventing the things that continue to make people, families and children homeless. I hope, now that the Government spin unit is being got rid of, that these things, such as homelessness, can be really faced up to and the reality of homelessness can be dealt with. Listening to the announcement of the recent figure and to what Sister Stanislaus Kennedy had to say, it would be easy to feel a sense of hopelessness about this. We all need to work together. I know my party has put forward proposition after proposition on tackling homelessness and the Government needs to take heed of them and do something urgently about it.

In light of the recent Belfast rape trial, while I am not specifically talking about that case, we need to learn from two aspects of it. There is an absolute need for an all-island approach to dealing with sexual violence and gender-based violence and over the coming months, I would like to work on that so that we can take the best bits from both areas to have solid legislation that will make this a safer place for women. I also urge those within the media and responsible reporters to come together with the National Union of Journalists, NUJ, to have a protocol for the reporting of gender-based violence and to work with the front-line services on that protocol so that we never again have to witness some of the headlines that have appeared in recent weeks. I ask them to think if it was their daughters or sisters, they would report the same headlines as they have reported over the last period.