Woman who fled home on Christmas Day is one of 11 people to secure emergency protection orders

A woman who fled with her young child from their home on Christmas Day after her former partner smashed the hall door was among 11 people who secured protection orders at an emergency District Court hearing over domestic violence.

Another woman got an interim barring order after she said she had been trying for three to four months to have her violent and abusive partner, a drug user, to leave her home but he had told her: “You will never get away from me.”

The distressed woman said he had smashed up her belongings, threatened to have her face “sliced” and to share intimate images of her on social media. She did not know when those images were taken and had not consented to them, she said.

Judge Gerard Furlong said the woman is very vulnerable in extremely difficult circumstances and an interim barring order was required in her case.

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The judge dealt with 14 ex parte (one side only represented) matters at a hearing at Dublin District Court on Friday of emergency domestic violence applications.

Two protection orders were refused, including one sought by a man whose estranged wife, the court heard, has already obtained a protection order. The man said he was afraid to leave the family home out of fear his wife, who lives next door, would change the locks. He said she has taken his pet dog and streams loud funeral music into the family home which he regarded as “a clear hint she wants me dead”. There was insufficient evidence for a protection order, the judge held.

Of the 11 protection orders granted, 10 were to women, including a woman who said her former partner, whom she split up with about two years ago, had banged on and screamed through the door of her home, threatening to kill her and her family and her new partner. “I can’t live with this fear,” she said.

Another woman who said she broke up with her partner of some two years about a month ago when she removed him from her apartment and “made it clear I never want to see him again” also got an order. She had blocked his phone number and social media accounts but, despite this, the man has sat outside the apartment “waiting for me to talk”.

Before she blocked his number, he told her that “he hopes I die in the car”, she said. She also believed he was responsible for deflating all of the car tyres.

He hacked into her social media and email accounts and on Christmas Day he got access to the apartment and smashed her hall door, she said. Out of fear, she had taken her child and they were staying with a relative, she said. The man is not the child’s father, she said.

A man obtained a protection order against his former partner, with whom he has four children. He said she has a mental health condition and the situation had deteriorated and they had split up. He said she had broken a sweeping brush over his back and thrown things at him, he is living in fear and is worried for the children.

A protection order was secured by a woman who said she wanted her long-term partner to leave her home because he has a major drink problem, which got worse during lockdown, and is abusive in front of their two young children.

He had said he would not leave, sleeps outside the house in his car and has had other alcoholics back to the car, which creates problems in the area, she said. “He knows that by doing that I’ll take him back because he is making a show of me.” She said he has threatened to put her windows and door in, banged a hammer off the front door and she and the children were very nervous.

In another case, a woman told the judge: “I feel like I am going crazy.” She is in fear of her husband and his behaviour has made her feel “suicidal”.

Her husband is a recovering alcoholic who accuses her of being an alcoholic, she said. He is “constantly screaming at me”, refuses to let her sleep in the bed with him and she has to sleep on the sofa. He has taken photos of her while she is asleep and sent them to family members, claiming she had “passed out”, she said.

The judge said he would grant a protection order more for reasons of the woman’s welfare than safety and hoped that would influence the man’s behaviour.