Irish Examiner view: Societal cancer that is gender-based violence must be cut out

Domestic violence — and gender-based violence more widely — is a cancer. And what do you do with a cancer? You cut it out.

We have a problem in this country with gender-based violence, and particularly violence toward women.

Even a cursory glance through the court listings, or the court reports published in this and other media outlets, show depressing levels of this abomination.

Just last week, Niamh Kelly welcomed the jailing of her former partner, Josh O’Brien, who stabbed her 50 times, leaving her with life-changing injuries from which she is still endeavouring to recover. She urged anybody in an abusive relationship to leave “before it gets even worse”, though we should acknowledge that more work needs to be done on a State level to ensure people fleeing those relationships have somewhere safe to go.

The moves to introduce Jennie’s Law, which would allow for a public register of people convicted of domestic violence against a partner or former partner, are welcome, overdue, and should be accelerated. The law is named after Jennifer Poole, who was murdered by her former partner, Gavin Murphy, in 2021, and is widely supported by victims and agencies that support them.

We are, it must be said, now in the run up to Christmas, when cases of domestic violence typically escalate; last year a record 1,600 calls were made to gardaí over Christmas week, while some 61,000 were made over the course of the year.

This is a shameful record, a stain across our whole country. There are often spikes around various holiday breaks, such as Christmas and Easter, which previous garda commissioner Drew Harris last year put down to families being together and “where there is actually no escape for the victim”.

It is by no means a uniquely Irish problem, given that warnings of similar expected increases are issued in Britain and the North ahead of Christmas every year.

That this suggests a certain level of normalisation of violence against women is deeply concerning; while the awareness campaigns are vital, and should not be dialled back, there is a deeper societal issue. Not a malaise, but something worse. If people who aren’t affected feel a sense of dread reading the headlines, how much more intensely felt is that dread for those directly affected?

Domestic violence — and gender-based violence more widely — is a cancer. And what do you do with a cancer? You cut it out.

We should be rooting this travesty out of our society, not preparing for it annually.

Ireland has just elected its third female head of state in a week where Iceland marked the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Day Off protest that was a major catalyst for advancing global gender equality, but there is a global backlash against feminism both on and offline.

While Iceland has narrowed the gender gap in many ways, it still suffers the blight of gender violence. Ireland, in any road, has a great way to go in true equality. Elements of misogyny have been present in the violent protests at Citywest, with far-right agitators widely claiming to be trying to “protect” women and children but are really just attempting to suppress and control them.

If they were really trying to protect women and children they would be addressing actual misogyny, not projecting it onto a group of people often fleeing circumstances more grim and dire than anything Ireland’s agitators will ever experience.

As Suryapratim Roy, Claire Walsh, and Rahul Sambaraju pointed out in Friday’s Irish Examiner: “There was no outcry about the deaths of Mongolian national Urantsetseq Tserendorj, killed by a white Irish teenager in an unprovoked attack in Dublin in 2021, or Jastine Valdez, a Filipina woman abducted in broad daylight and murdered by a white Irish man while walking to her family home in Bray in 2018.

Jennie’s Law is a good place to start in pushing back against domestic violence, but we need to do more, and faster, to prevent more cases like those of Niamh Kelly, Jennifer Poole, Urantsetseq Tserendorj, and Jastine Valdez.

Gaza's children hope for a better future

With midterm having begun, the nation’s legion of children and their teachers have emptied the classrooms, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be back in just a few days (even if some are in denial about it right now).

The 600,000 children of Gaza, however, are still not back in schoolhouses, two years after many had to be collected by their parents at the outset of Israel’s invasion. No doubt they expected to be back. Instead, many of them, if they’re receiving education at all, are attending crammed classes in tents, writing on the floor if they have anything to write with.

At least during the covid lockdowns children here had some access to remote learning, even if it was dependent on the relevant technology. Even though there are e-learning programmes in Gaza, most of the children are refugees and frequently do not have access to electricity, let alone equipment. They barely have access to food and water.

Juwayriya Adwan, 12, told The Guardian: “Sometimes I still vividly remember the sounds and smells: Chalk dust, pencil shavings, laughter echoing down the halls. But my school no longer exists; it was bombed by the Israelis soon after the war began. My books were burned, and some of my friends killed.” 

Most children in the Gaza Strip have similar stories. That legacy — psychological as well as physical — may take a full generation to work through, if indeed it ever does.

Where youngsters should be engaged in all the hallmarks of childhood, instead their lives consist of struggling to merely survive.

What a boon it would be, then, for an education setting to give them some sense of normalcy. Regardless of whether the present ceasefire holds, or whether much vaunted peace and development plans by foreign powers come to fruition, nothing may ever be normal in Gaza again, given the level of apocalyptic damage to the place and its people.

Education remains one of the great uplifters in the world, giving access to employment opportunities and networking as well as the simple joy of learning. How many of our own ancestors, living through the Penal Laws or the Famine, would have thrived had the right education been afforded to them?

Flawed though it may be in many ways, especially for those with special or additional needs, we should nonetheless treasure our access to education. It can, and will, provide the hope of brighter futures. One hopes that in time, the children of Gaza will again share in that.

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