I want to speak about Walk Out Wednesday, which many Senators in the Chamber will have participated in this morning. Walk Out for Women is a campaign which is being led by Monica Murphy of Waterford. I commend her on the work she has done on this and for the cross-party support it has got here in Leinster House and nationally following the reports. It is great to see that many workplaces were involved in it this morning. It is raising awareness of gender-based violence and domestic violence. It is important that we do this. What spurred Monica on to do this was the fact that ten women have already died violently in Ireland in the first nine months of this year. It is incredible to note that this is an increase on seven last year, the entirety of 2025, and an increase on five in 2024.

Strategies are being put in place and reviews are being done, but it is clearly not working. I remember standing in Cork County Council chamber in January 2022 when Ashling Murphy was violently murdered, which I am sure everyone remembers. I am not sure that we have progressed a lot in those four and a half years. We have seen a lot of work done at political level. I again commend Frances Fitzgerald on the gender violence based directive in European Parliament, and Kathleen Funchion MEP, who currently sits on the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, FEMM, and is also working on this. In June 2022, Helen McEntee, when she was Minister for Justice, published the third national strategy on gender-based and domestic violence. While this report is continually under review, the most recent annual progress report was published in March this year. It is important that we bring the current Minister for justice into the House to review the progress report that has been published. The measures are being put in. The most recent strategy brought in extra education on consent and coercive control and extra victim refuge spaces. It is clearly not working and we need to see how we can improve things, because it is a massive increase that ten women have died in violence-based circumstances so far this year.