Fórsa has backed the growing calls for domestic violence leave legislation. The union’s national secretary Ashley Connolly said the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed the need for a better response to victims of domestic violence.

Last month, delegates at Fórsa’s national conference called for new laws to establish the right to statutory paid leave as part of a package of workplace measures to assist victims of domestic violence.

Ashley said these measures were necessary because women living with, or escaping from, domestic abuse are far more likely to have several urgent and important appointments to attend.

“These include medical visits, legal proceedings, counselling for themselves or their children, changing children’s schools. Most can’t do this outside working hours, either because the services aren’t available or, worse, because they need to hide this from their abusers.

“Victims end up having to take unpaid leave, use up annual leave, or even miss work and risk losing the very job that gets them out of an abusive situation, if only for a few hours each day,” she said.

Women's Aid chief executive Sarah Benson recently said that extra leave was important as many victims have to take annual leave or even unpaid leave to deal with the upheaval that comes with domestic violence.

“Many women already have a limited income and a wage cut due to unpaid leave may be very difficult to manage. In certain cases, they may leave or lose their job,” she said.

Irish Congress of Trade Unions policy officer Laura Bambrick said the issue of who pays for the domestic leave also needed to be addressed. She called for cooperation from representatives for employers’ bodies.

Delegates at the union’s conference last month had unanimously backed a conference motion from the union’s national executive calling for statutory paid leave for victims of domestic violence.

Data from the advocacy group Safe Ireland, found that nearly 3,500 women and 600 children contacted a domestic violence service for the first time during the opening six months of the pandemic.

Ashley said that 249 women have died violently in Ireland between 1996 and 2022, one in four women in Ireland have been subjected to some form of abuse, while studies have found that 40% of victims said the abuse affected their ability to get to work, and almost 60% said they had to take time off work because of the abuse.

The conference motion commits the union to actively campaign to legislate for an effective statutory entitlement to paid leave for victims of domestic violence, encourage the union’s networks to raise the issue of workplace supports for victims and survivors of domestic violence with employers in their sectors, and investigate the potential of extending the union’s existing counselling service to include a dedicated confidential service for victims of domestic abuse and gender-based violence.