Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming to the House today. I support Coco's law. Some weeks ago, the parents and grandparents of two beautiful girls were outside the gates of Leinster House with the girls' photographs. Looking at the images of these girls, one found oneself wondering what happened, why and how. My mind immediately goes to the mother and father standing in a mortuary looking at the cold body of their beautiful child, dead. Why? They do not know and neither do we. We know that there was some online harassment involved. We might think of it as childhood playing but it is not. We have taken the bullies out of the school and brought them onto social media. Being online and anonymous allows these bullies to do and say what they feel like. There is no way, or at least it is extremely difficult, to track down who is saying something to someone. People may think that, at the end of the day, it is only a bit of fun and that they are only giving someone a hard time but we forget that none of us, no matter how strong we are, can take constant harassment.

I recall from my time as a teacher, teaching a computer course, mainly to young men who were 18 or 19 years of age. I was sitting in my office one day when the door burst open and a young man stood before me in floods of tears. He kept shouting, "I am not a homosexual." I tried to figure out what was going on. The Internet was not around at that time but there was a messaging system on the computing system we were using. It started with one message a day, then it became two, then ten and then it was a message every 15 minutes. This young man was subjected to this treatment because he had an effeminate way about him. If the Internet had been available at that stage, it would have pursued him outside of the college and followed him into his home and into his bedroom.

The year I became president of the Teachers Union of Ireland, twin girls committed suicide in Donegal within two weeks of one another. I remember visiting the school. It was in absolute disarray. The teachers and children were in a state of nervous tension. The principal told me that he sat in his car at night because his family could no longer take the messages coming into the House. He sat in his car at night while his staff supervised social media and tipped him off as to where there might be a problem. This was going on constantly. He told me that what bothered him was that the parents of these children made sure they changed into their pyjamas, brushed their teeth and washed their faces before they went to bed but that the one thing they would not do was take their phones off them so they would not have access to social media. The children, therefore, bring the harassment to their bedrooms with them.

This brings me on to where we need to go. We need Coco's law and I congratulate Deputy Howlin and all in the Labour Party for bringing it forward. We need to go back to our education system as well. We need to instil in children who go through the education system what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. As a teacher, I have had occasion to talk to parents who insisted that their little John or Mary would never do anything, but they do. They drove some beautiful young girls to take their own lives. That is what it is about. The more quickly society wakes up to that fact, the better. Members of this House have been harassed. We eventually tracked down the person who was harassing a former Labour Party Senator and he was taken before the courts.That sort of harassment goes on all day, every day. It occurs across all socioeconomic groupings and genders.

That brings me to the topic of domestic violence. It never ceases to amaze me. One can meet a lovely couple who have just met and are madly in love. Everything seems fantastic. They get married or simply move in together and set up a home. Somewhere along the line it goes terribly wrong. It says something about our society that we are prepared to turn a blind eye to the violence that goes on. Any woman I have ever known who was subjected to domestic violence was broken and destroyed by the time it became public knowledge. Women's mental health is ruined. Recovery takes years.

I do not know why any man would go that way. A woman can be a hard person to live with and I am sure men can be hard to live with. Some of us do not seem to be able to argue, get the frustration of normal human relationships out into the open, solve the problem and move on. All too sadly for so many women and some men, we end up in a situation where violence is the only solution. It is pretty harrowing to think that couples who start out so beautifully can finish that way.

We must be mindful of an issue that came up as a result of the 2008 economic crash. I have met a significant number of women who are single parents today. Their husbands borrowed money on the strength of the family home and when things took a turn for the worse they inflicted another sort of violence. They walked away, leaving these women with children and nothing else but debts, problems and the constant threat of losing their homes. We have no solution. I dealt with one woman whose husband had doubled the mortgage through a predatory lending company. When the cheque for the second half of the mortgage arrived he picked up the cash, which he told her he was using to pay off tax debts, and left her with nothing. The ruthless banks known as "vulture funds" came after her. They did not go after him to find out what he had done with the money. My colleague, Senator Ward, is looking at me. I know the family home was the asset and that is what the banks naturally pursued. I can understand that. However, this is a form of domestic violence that nobody sees.

The type of violence we are talking about takes place in the shadows, without the knowledge of the general public. Sometimes even the relations of those involved do not know how badly the relationship has broken down. By the time a woman makes it public that she is suffering from domestic violence that she can no longer live with, she is a broken individual. I remember when the first refuge centre in Galway opened in the 1970s. People thought we did not need one in Galway because that type of thing did not happen there. The numbers read out by my colleagues today put the lie to that. Somebody said that Covid-19 has accelerated this. I do not believe it has. Rather, there is no respite at all now. Husbands, wives and children are at home all of the time. This has brought the issue into the open once again.

I will support the Labour Party and I hope we see some strong legislation on this.