Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister and I exchanged messages earlier. I will obviously support the Government’s position. The privilege and the difficulty of being on the Government bench is that while you may not always agree with or like what goes through, you support it.

On Monday of this week, I sat for a long time with a woman in the context of a completely different conversation that I will come back to in the coming weeks. This woman spoke of the level of abuse in a relationship over the last number of years and its consequences. She was never subjected to physical assault. Everything was a psychological assault and a financial assault on her. It was to curtail her finances, to beset her, to watch her and to monitor absolutely everything about the woman’s life to the extent that she was so psychologically traumatised that she had no confidence in making any decision about anything. It has taken a lot of support and counselling for her to build up and be able to discuss anything.

In the context of sitting with her and listening, I saw just how short and challenged the responses of the State are to a person in those situations. When you look at a Bill that has domestic violence leave in it, you think it is a massive step forward and that it is fantastic. The nature of Report Stage is that we do not have the backwards and forwards engagement for which I would have wished at this point. The Minister has tabled amendments and I would have liked to have been able to hear his amendments and to have been able to engage with them backwards and forwards. Since we get one shot at it, I would like to hear some reassurance from the Minister that we cannot put in place a leave and make mandatory, statutory provisions that could potentially cause harm or could potentially render us in a position where people cannot avail of that leave. It seems to be an entire waste of our time. I am not quite sure what it is, but there is no point in providing for it unless it is effective. There is no point in putting something impotent on a statutory footing, when everyone in the field is saying they will not avail of it. The level of this detail by which the man watched and monitored this woman was extraordinary. As I sat listening to her, all that went through the back of my head was exactly this type of leave. These are the situations where a sudden drop in wages would actually have been spotted, would have been queried and would have led her to an even more vulnerable place in that context.

I urge the Minister to provide us with some sort of mechanism or reassurance as to how that will not be the case, how this will not be an impotent Bill and how it will be an effective tool to assist victims of domestic violence. We must bear in mind that from the Tusla perspective, domestic violence is physical assault, emotional and psychological abuse, financial abuse, sexual violence, social abuse, harassment on social media and honour-based violence. It covers all the psychological and financial abuse that the very provision we are putting in for may give rise to causing in a relationship or for a vulnerable person. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on it. I will stand firm that I do not think it is right for us to have a 70% provision. I do not think it is right. I will vote with the Government but I will do so with an incredibly heavy heart.