Ruth Coppinger

5 young people including Irish citizen Daniel Tatlow-Devally, are on trial in Stuttgart for damaging an Elbit Systems site — one of the key weapons manufacturers for the Zionist State’s genocide on Palestine. They have been subjected to inhumane conditions in pre-trial detention including only being allowed out of their cell for 1 hour per day and are now being held within a glass enclosure for their trial, preventing them from consulting with their legal teams. This brutality has been disproportionately directed at Palestine activists globally. I will be travelling to witness part of the trial next week alongside other opposition TDs and will report from there.

I’m delighted that there will be a new Special Joint Oireachtas Committee on Preventing and Responding to Domestic, Sexual and Gender Based Violence, that I will be the chair of, beginning in September. A committee that examines and interrogates the public health emergency and epidemic that is gender based violence is urgently needed. It will run for 2 years and will ultimately make recommendations the government. Of course we cannot wait for a committee to address gender based violence — I will continue to campaign in the immediate term. Let me know in the comments the issues that you think should be discussed in this incoming committee.

Adina Constantin and Jamey Carney were both killed by men that they knew within a week of each other and today a story is breaking of a suspected familicide in Ballymena. There have been more women killed by femicide half way through this year than in the entirety of 2025. Ant yet racist, anti-choice TDs like Ken O’Flynn are pretending to be experts on violence against women and attacking years long feminist campaigners like myself. The truth about gendered violence needs to be shouted from the rooftops: proximity to a man, not someone’s ethnicity or nationality is the greatest risk.