Senator Gerard Craughwell - speech from 24 Nov 2020

Minister, thank you for coming to the House today. Minister, a rise in support of Cocos Law. Some weeks ago we had the parents of two beautiful girls, grandparents as well, and their photographs outside the gates of Leinstra House. And looking at both of those girls, their images, one finds themselves wondering how, why, what happened. And my mind immediately goes to the mother and father who are standing in a mortuary looking at the cold body of their beautiful child, Dade. Why? They don't know. We don't know. We know that there was some online harassment, some online, I suppose, we might call it childhood playing, but it's not childhood playing. And what we've done is we've taken the bully from the schoolyard and brought them into social media. And being there and being anonymous allows them to do and say as they feel. And there is no way, or at least it's extremely difficult, to track down who's saying what to whom. And sure, it's only a bit of fun at the end of the day. Sure, we're only giving her a hard time. But we forget, none of us, no matter how strong we are, none of us can take constant, constant harassment. I recall in my time teaching, we were teaching a computer course to young men mainly, who were 18, 19 years of age. And I was sitting in my office one day and the door of my office burst open. And this young man stood in front of me in the floods of tears and he kept shouting at me, I am not a homosexual, I am not a homosexual. And I tried to figure out what's going on here. The internet wasn't around at that time, but there was, on the computer system that we were using, a messaging system. And it started off with one message a day and then it became two, then it became 10, and then it became a message every 15 minutes. And this young man, because he had a sort of an effeminate way about him, was subjected to this. And if it were the case that the internet was available at that stage, it would have pursued him outside of the college. It would have followed him into his home, into his bedroom. The year I became president of the Teachers Union of Ireland, we had twin girls committed suicide in Northern Ireland, or in Donegal. And they were, I think, within two weeks, one another, they committed suicide. And I remember going up to visit the school, and the school was in absolute disarray. The teachers in the school were in a state of nervous tension, the children in the school were in a state of nervous tension. And the principal explained to me that he sat in his car at night, because his family could no longer take the messages coming into the house. He sat in his car at night, while his staff supervised social media and tipped him off to where there might be a problem. And this was going on constantly. And he turned to me, and he said to me, you know, Ger, he said, what bothers me? He said, the parents of these children will make sure they change into their pyjamas, they wash their teeth, they wash their face before they go to bed. And the one thing they won't do is take their phone off them, take their social media off them. So they bring the harassment with them to the bedrooms. And this brings me on to where we need to go. We need Coco's Law, and I congratulate Brendan Howland and all in the Labour Party for bringing that forward. But we need to go back to our education system. We need to instill in the children that go to our education system what is acceptable behaviour and what's unacceptable. And, you know, I've had occasion as a teacher to talk to parents. I'm sure my little John would never do anything, or my little Mary would never do anything. Well, they do. And they drove some beautiful young girls to take their own lives. That's what it's about. And the quicker that society wakes up to that fact, members of this house have been harassed. A former Labour senator here, eventually we tracked down who was harassing her, and he was taken before the courts. And that sort of harassment is going on all day, every day. And it is right across all socioeconomic groupings. It is right across all genders. Which brings me on to the domestic violence. It never ceases to amaze me that you meet a lovely couple that have just met. They're madly in love. Everything seems fantastic. They set up home, whether it's married or whether it's just a relationship where they move in together. And then somewhere along the line, it goes terribly, terribly wrong. And whatever it is about our society, either we're prepared to turn a blind eye to the violence that's going on. Because unfortunately, any woman I have ever known who has been subjected to domestic violence, by the time it became public knowledge, she was broken. She was destroyed. Her mental health was ruined. And it takes years and years and years of recovery. And I don't know why any man would go that way. I can tell you, a woman can be a hard person to live with, and I'm sure men can be hard to live with. But we don't seem to be able to, some of us at least, don't seem to be able to argue and get the frustration that exists in normal human relationships, out into the open, solve the problem and move on. And sadly, all too sadly for so many women and some men, we finish up in a situation where violence is the only solution. And when you think of the beautiful couple that started out in one way and finished up in that way, it is pretty harrowing. But one of the things, Minister, we've got to take on board here is something that came up as a result of the economic crash in 2008. I have come across a significant number of women who today are single parents, whose husbands borrowed money on the strength of their family home. And when things took a turn for the worst, in another sort of violence, they walked away and they left this woman with children and with nothing but debts and problems and the constant threat of having the family home taken off them. And again, we have no solution. One particular woman who I dealt with, her husband doubled the mortgage through one of the shark lending companies and when the cheque arrived for the second half of the mortgage, which he told her he was using to pay off tax debts, he picked up the cash and he left. And he left her with nothing. And the ruthless banks came after her. The vulture funds, as we call them, they came after her. Did they go after him? Did they look for him to find out what he did with the money? No, they didn't. And I'm sure I see my colleague, Senator Ward, looking at me, that family home was the asset and that's naturally what they'd go after. And I can understand that. But that is a form of domestic violence that nobody sees. The nature of the type of violence we're talking about all takes place in the shadows. All takes place where the general public don't know, for God's sake, even relations don't know that a relationship has broken down that far. Sometimes. And sadly, going back to what I originally said, by the time a woman makes it public, that domestic violence she can no longer live with, they're broken. Broken individuals. And I remember in the 1970s when the first refuse centre opened in Galway, people said, good God almighty, we don't need one of those in Galway. So that doesn't go on down here. And when you hear the numbers being called out by my colleagues here today, and somebody said that, you know, COVID-19 has accelerated this. I don't believe it has. I think that what has happened is because there is no respite at all now, husbands are at home all of the time, wives are at home all of the time, children are at home all of the time. And I think what has happened is that it has brought it into the open once again. So I will be supporting the Labour Party, and I hope that we see some strong legislation coming through. Thank you, Les Cariola. Thank you, Les Cariola.