Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief. I congratulate my colleague, Senator Martin, on pursuing this and I give very significant thanks to Noeline Blackwell for all her work, not only on legislation but also in advocacy down through the years. It is quite interesting that so much legislation on violence against women, in particular - it is predominantly women who are impacted by this legislation - has come through the Seanad in our term. We are almost seeing a snowball effect now. I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Browne, so much for taking this on board and for putting it into Government legislation. It was a very significant step forward to have coercive control seen as a criminal offence, but my colleague is completely right in that, the more we can do to ensure people feel they can step forward and feel unafraid to go into our courts, the more we can address this insidious level of violence against women we have at the moment.