"Women would call us into the toilet and show us their bruises. It was incredible. There were so many stories and women who needed practical support."
This was how a community group started dealing with violence against women, according to Ms Rita Fagan from the Family Resource Centre in Dublin's St Michael's Estate, Inchicore.
Yesterday the Community Workers' Co-operative and the St Michael's Centre published Violence Against Women - An Issue for Community Work and a video called Once is Too Much, based on the St Michael's Estate project.
The Minister of State for Justice, Ms Mary Wallace, told the launch that the national steering committee on violence against women would report shortly.
She praised the exhibition and said concerns about an increase in reported rapes had resulted in a number of research studies. A review of the 1996 Domestic Violence Act was also nearing completion, she said.
Forty women were killed in the last 26 months, Ms Grainne O'Toole of the co-operative told the audience of more than 200 people. "The central theme of the publication is that violence against women is ultimately about the power and control of women by men. It is this power and control which maintain inequality between women and men and are reflected in the institutions of the State," she said.
The audience saw the video in which friends of community worker Ms Mary Bailey describe how she was killed in 1991 on the estate. She intervened in a row between and man and his wife, community worker Ms Anita Koppenhoffer said.
"He was hurting her and Mary tried to stop that. He pushed Mary to the ground . . . It was only when that happened that we realised that men do kill." Ms Bailey was 37 when she died, leaving two young daughters.
The community response to violence meant that women on the estate could get help locally, community worker Ms Marian Keogh said. "Instead of a woman having to go to 100 different places before she can get any bit of relevant information, anyone of us can say `Look, here are your options'. "
With the help of Women's Aid, the community set up a project which had changed the attitude towards violence against women, Ms Keogh said. "This man actually threw his wife, or his partner, out of the window," she said. The residents were shocked and "all got together as a community and marched to this man's door". More than 140,000 people had visited the exhibition, Ms Fagan said. It had been organised by the 17 women in the Family Resource Centre and put together with the help of artists, and was first shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
"People always ask `why does she stay?', and they never ask, `why does he do it, why do men beat women?' "
One of the exhibits was a set of glass shelves with dates underneath and a fresh lily on the shelf to represent murdered women. Three days after the exhibition opened, Galway taxi-driver Eileen Costello-O'Shaughnessy was murdered. Another lily was placed on a shelf, left empty to represent missing women and the next victim.
