Eileen Flynn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

First, I welcome Senator Martin's Bill. Even today, I am working with a woman who is going through domestic violence and needs access to services. In March 2020, before I was nominated to the Seanad, I was supporting a woman with five children who was living on the streets of Dublin to seek refuge and because she had fled her home country and was at no major risk from her abuser, she was denied access to a woman's refuge. That led her into addiction and criminality, and her kids have now been taken away from her.That was a failure by the State, unfortunately, in not having services that are fit for purpose for women in this country. While I agree with Senator Martin's Bill and I support it there should be stronger sanctions for people who break barring orders.

I wish to put on the record that domestic violence has no part and does not have a place in Traveller culture or the Traveller way of life. I have seen this through first-hand experience a lot of the time when, even back in the 1990s, if one was to call the Garda and get the abuser removed from the home in a lot of cases within the Traveller community we are told "This is part of your culture". While we are looking at sanctions for breaking barring orders we also need to train people around this. It is no fault to the Garda because gardaí need to be trained. We all need to be trained on this because sometimes we can make assumptions. I am not bad mouthing or talking negatively about the Garda. We need gardaí to help women, and men, to escape domestic violence in this country.

We need to focus on services. Since I have been in this House this is my fourth time to speak about domestic violence and to debate Bills on domestic violence, and yet the root problem is around services and supporting those services so that women and men have wraparound support, be it counselling, or help with addiction issues, or whatever may be needed. There are a lot of underlying problems and issues behind why domestic violence happens in some families and in some communities. Unfortunately it can be the case of "monkey see, monkey do". It is about breaking that vicious cycle of domestic violence within some homes.

One of my friends works in a women's refuge. She is the first to say that the refuge is not fit for purpose because there is not the wraparound support women and children need. Some 54,000 phone calls were made last year to the Garda around domestic violence. We should have an ethnic identifier to know which communities are being affected. It would not make a big difference but women in minority groups and Traveller women need that extra bit of support to get away. I have worked with numerous women in this area and, unfortunately, from the Traveller community in some cases. I worked with one woman 15 years ago who was told she was barred from a refuge because two of her children had ADHD with behaviour issues. That is no way to treat women who are going through abuse especially if they have to go back into that situation.

My colleagues have spoken on the fact that we do not consider the women and men affected by domestic violence who also end up on our streets as homeless. There is a cost to this homelessness from domestic violence. That should be in the records also. There should be a section that records, for example, that 100 women are homeless due to domestic violence. That status should be categorised every year or whenever the data is made available to us.

Nine counties in this country do not have a domestic violence service. I understand that the Senator's Bill is focused on the barring order and breaches of the barring order, which I welcome and especially for Traveller women. It should be the one law for everybody and not that it is okay for some men to be abusers if it is seen to be part of their culture. It is not. The debate today gives me this opportunity to highlight some of the gaps within our domestic violence services. I am aware that the Minister, Deputy McEntee, is doing everything in her power and, as other Senators have rightly said, the Minister has brought in some really good legislation around coercive control. There is, however, a bigger conversation we need to have around investing in domestic violence refuges for women and for men.