By Irishexaminer.com

Copyright irishexaminer

An increasing number of women and children are trapped in a vortex of abusiveness and cruelty. However, the links between the housing crisis, homelessness, and the resulting abuse are not being connected with sufficient emphasis.

Women entombed in a violent and abusive domestic scenario may have no safe alternative housing options. Meanwhile, the dearth of accommodation has seen some landlords seek sex for rent. Both issues are entwined wholly with the housing crisis. The threat for some of losing your home is an essential element of coercive violence. That risk, and the difficulty many have to find a safe haven, are part of a downward spiral many women find it impossible to escape.

The figures are stark. Focus Ireland maintains there has been a 45% rise in the number of homeless women between 2022 and 2024, while Women’s Aid statistics for last year alone indicate the highest number of disclosures in more than 50 years of operation.

That the Central Statistics Office figures for 2023 estimate that 52% of Irish women will experience sexual violence in their lifetimes is damning.

This “cycle of vulnerability” is becoming more and more difficult for women and children to escape from.

A National Women’s Council conference in Dublin laid bare the links between homelessness, the housing crisis, and increasing violence against them — and the lack of sufficient refuge spaces is exacerbating the problem.

The absence, too, of long-term housing solutions for women and children running from abusive relationships is not helping.

That sex-for-rent exploitation has not been outlawed, and the near non-existence of trauma-informed housing for trafficking victims and those women exiting the sex trade is creating further obstacles to stemming the tide of horror.

If we are to paint ourselves as a fair and just society, we need to find solutions quickly — everyone should have the right to feel safe in their own home.

Do-nothing Dáil needs to work

As our elected representatives return today after the summer recess, the tag that has haunted the Coalition during its time in power as a “do-nothing Dáil” will have to be shed quickly if the administration is to regain any traction as a credible one.

All the main parties held their pre-season think-ins over the past week, all aware that thinking and proposing is one thing — ‘doing’ is something far different.

There are no easy subjects in the Government’s inbox. Far from making inroads on the key issues of housing, health, homelessness, the energy crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, the crisis within disability, to name but a few — the statistics are all going in the wrong direction. To Joe and Joan Public, the numbers don’t lie, no matter how you try to spin it.

The first major hurdle for the Government is Budget 2026 early next month, and no matter how hard they try to dampen expectations, everyone will be looking for something.

This year’s budget package of €9.4bn, made up of €1.5bn in tax cuts and a €7.9bn spending, has been well flagged, but already the Government is warning that there may be less wiggle room on the personal taxation side, which will be difficult to explain away. So too will be the repeated warnings that there will be no one-off measures this time around with energy bills and food prices again on the increase.

Perhaps scared by the potential for a voter backlash against their presidential candidates, there has been a sudden push from both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste for tangible action.

At Monday’s Fianna Fáil parliamentary party brainstorming session in Cork, Micheál Martin threatened to use governmental powers to force the rezoning of land for housing construction if local authorities refuse to do so, sidelining council bosses up and down the country.

Stating he was “taken aback” by the number of city and county councils refusing to rezone land in the midst of a housing crisis — and singling out Dublin City Council for particular opprobrium — the Taoiseach said he simply could not comprehend this. He also gave Wicklow County Council the sharp end of his tongue for dezoning land earmarked for housing, and said councils had been given clear instructions to rezone but were seemingly inured to doing so.

A continued failure to do so, he said, would result in the Government sidelining council executives and using legislation to zone land.

We’ve heard versions of this before — what’s been missing is any follow-through — not just on housing, but the myriad of other issues that the opposition will be only too willing to remind the Government that it has so far failed to get control of.

Genocide in Gaza

As the UN confirmed what everyone already knows by stating that ‘evidence was mounting’ of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, US president Donald Trump has greenlighted their land assault on Gaza City, saying Hamas was now using the estimated 20 remaining hostages as human shields.

Trump’s failure to stop the government of Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued assault on the Palestinian people is now tantamount to complicity, as is the lack of action from the EU to penalise the continuing Israeli barbarity.

History has taught us many lessons — all too many of which we persistently ignore — and primary amongst them is the fact that might is rarely right.

It could easily be surmised that the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere demonstrated just that over and over again. Israel, not alone with its savagery in Gaza, but also with its unprovoked attack on Qatar, has demonstrated a thirst for mayhem and atrocity like few others in the modern era.

With the numbers of dead in this conflict fast approaching 65,000 and destined to worsen, any remaining hope of a peace deal seems further away than ever.