Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-12 ============================================================ Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin Curim fáilte roimh an Aire and his official. I commend my colleagues from Fianna Fáil on bringing forward this Private Members' motion. It is on occasions such as this when we get to speak in a collegial fashion that one can see the power of collective action and political will to deal with an issue. I find this issue very shocking. The Minister knows my track record when it comes to domestic, and particularly gender-based and sexual, violence. According to Women's Aid, a woman is abused every 15 minutes in this country. That happens every 15 minutes, 356 days of the year, 24 hours a day. It is an extraordinary phenomenon. We know that because these women have come forward with their experiences of abuse and have raised concerns. I rather suspect it is a lot higher. We must consider the reasons for this. Senators Stephenson, Clifford-Lee and Flynn touched on the misogyny in our society and the patriarchal underpinnings that not only normalise violence against women, coercion and subordination, but fetishise it in every aspect, including popular culture, our so-called learned culture, our courts and every other aspect. In Ireland, one woman every 15 minutes and one child every hour - 24-7, 365 days a year - is the target of abuse. I do not want to trivialise this issue but if a woman was bitten by a dog every 15 minutes or if a child was electrocuted by a toaster every hour in Ireland, it would bring the nation to a halt. One in three women suffers psychological, physical and sexual abuse from an intimate partner. That is extraordinary. We all know this. Every single person in this room, in these Houses or down on Grafton Street has this abuse in their own direct or extended family. One in three. It reminds me of the expression, and again I do not mean to trivialise things, that it is not the monster under the bed we need to teach our children about but it is the monster in the bed, whoever that may be. We saw an enormous moral panic being engendered over a very small number of people being infected by hantavirus on a cruise ship. The Government jet was mobilised, and quite rightly so, and people were wearing hazmat suits. Yet, a woman is abused every 15 minutes. To paraphrase Senator Clifford-Lee, I agree that it is no longer swept under the carpet but it is definitely the elephant in the room. I do not see urgency on the part of our society. I am not blaming the Government or politicians. I do not see the urgency in our society to deal with this. There is a tacit acceptance that women and children will be abused. That also extends to the LGBTQI community, where there are particular risk factors and accelerating factors. I would also say that 98% of disabled women have expressed a fear that they face significant obstacles in reporting and trying to deal with abuse. They are particularly vulnerable. We have that intersectional, interconnected, whole-of-society and whole-of-government set of concerns where fear of homelessness and precarious living conditions accelerate the risk and make people more vulnerable to this type of abuse. I have been dealing, for the last two years, with a young woman with an intellectual disability who was raped in State-funded care. There are significant challenges in dealing with An Garda Síochána and making a complaint and a report. This is an area that really has to be looked at. I have been reading about the Oireachtas joint committee on media and communications and the great work it has been doing in attempting to hold the social media conglomerates to account. The conglomerates argue that there are issues around privacy and identity that they have to protect and so on but that is all horse feathers. In the last two years, Palantir and other AI-enhanced algorithms and programmes have identified people, their addresses, their age and their relatives in order to kill them. There is nothing difficult about identifying people who are under age. No child should have access to pornography and the toxic content that is online. For the industry to claim that it does not have the technological means or the skill set to do that is completely and utterly disingenuous. It is a lie. We compelled the automotive industry to put in airbags, seat belts, motion sensors and tracking controls at huge expense to that industry. Are the tech bros really telling us they cannot use the same algorithms they are using to groom our children to switch that content off? It is not that they cannot do it; it is that they will not do it. Ireland has a leadership role in this, given how many of them are headquartered in our jurisdiction, and I know that the Minister is very proactive. A couple of speakers said that men need to be involved in this debate and to speak out. I did that and I experienced immediate and sustained retaliation for that. Not one of the agencies that support women experiencing domestic and sexual violence came out and supported me. The only person who did so was a colleague of the Minister's, Ms Paulyn Marrinan Quinn, a senior counsel. The questions we have to address as a society are why there is this tacit acceptance and why there is push-back, a word used by one of my colleagues earlier, when we try to address this elephant in the room. One assault or abuse every 15 minutes is completely unacceptable. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:55+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-12