Mary offered her commiserations to family, friends, pupils, colleagues of Ashling Murphy, when she spoke in the Seanad this week:

The sadness and anger are impossible to adequately express.

While the whole country and beyond is convulsed and repulsed by Ashling’ s murder, it is important that we recognise that Since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland.

One in four women in Ireland have been abused by their partner, in 2020 alone there were 855 disclosures of sexual abuse made to the Women’s Aid services.

Last November Mary and other Senators asked for the Minister for Justice to come to the Seanad to debate the issue of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence and specifically violence against women.

We must acknowledge as a society that we have a large-scale social problem with violence and specifically violence against women.

We cannot ignore that violence against women in Ireland is killing our mothers, our sisters, our daughters and our friends.

This violence in our communities and in our society is a deep seeded social problem and we need a deep rooted, systemic response that deals with everything from language, to education, to housing, to health, policing, to entertainment right down to the daily lives of woman and girl in every village and town.