The Emergency We Refuse to Name
Another woman is dead. Another family is destroyed. Another community is left standing at a garden gate, laying flowers, asking how this happened again.
Jamey Carney was found dead in her home on Muckross Road in Killarney on Tuesday. She was 43. She had moved to Kerry from the New York area in 2021, built a life working in healthcare in nearby Tralee, and was raising a 13-year-old daughter who is now the one left without her mother. Neighbours have described her as warm, kind, and well liked in the local community. Gardaí are following a definite line of inquiry and are trying to trace a man known to her.
That is the shape of it, stripped down…. a woman, a home that should have been safe, a child who found out, a town in shock. It is a shape this country has seen before, over and over, until the shock has started to curdle into something closer to dread.
The number that should stop us in our tracks
Women’s Aid has confirmed that Jamey Carney’s death brings the total number of women who have died violently in Ireland, since the organisation began keeping its Femicide Watch record in 1996, to 286.
Sit with that for a second. Not 286 as a statistic on a slide in some strategy document. 286 women. 286 birthdays that will never be marked again. 286 families, friendship groups, and communities left to carry a grief that never gets to become “old grief,” because it keeps being joined by new grief.
And the trend line is not flattening. Eight women have now died violently in Ireland so far this year — a figure that has already overtaken the total for all of 2025. In the Dáil this week, Labour leader Ivana Bacik pointed out that as of Jamey’s death, the number of women killed violently in Ireland in 2026 had overtaken the whole of last year — in just seven months. Taoiseach Micheál Martin, responding to her, acknowledged plainly that the numbers “are not going in the right direction.”
We are not slowing this down. We are watching it accelerate.
“Known to them” is the phrase that should terrify us
Roughly 87% of women killed in Ireland, in cases that have been resolved, were killed by a man known to them — a partner, an ex-partner, a family member, someone who was let into their life and their home. This isn’t a story about strangers in dark alleyways. It’s a story about front doors, kitchens, and bedrooms. About the people women trusted enough to let close.
That single fact should reframe every conversation we have about “women’s safety.” This was never primarily a problem of poorly lit streets or safety apps. It is a problem of what happens behind closed doors, and of a society that has spent decades treating men’s violence against women as a private tragedy rather than a public emergency.
We have said “never again” before
After Ashling Murphy was murdered in 2022, the country said never again. There were vigils, statements, promises of reform, a renewed domestic violence strategy. And in the years since that promise, roughly 40 more women have died violently in Ireland. Forty more women with names, families, futures.
Women’s Aid has also pointed to something that rarely makes the headlines alongside the grief: the housing crisis is trapping women and children in violent homes, because leaving is not simply a matter of will, it’s a matter of having anywhere safe to go. Women stay, or return, because the alternative is homelessness for themselves and their children. That is not a personal failing. That is a policy failure with a body count.
What “action” actually has to mean
Nobody grieving Jamey Carney, or Adina Raluca Constantin, whose death was raised in the same Dáil session this week, or any of the other 284 women on that list, needs another report confirming what has already been confirmed 286 times over. What’s needed now is action that can be measured, not sentiment that can be quoted:
- Emergency, ring-fenced funding for refuge spaces and emergency accommodation, so that “there’s nowhere for her to go” stops being a reason women stay in dangerous homes.
- Real enforcement of the fourth National Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Strategy, with published targets and public accountability for whether they’re being met — not just its existence as a document.
- Fast, safe pathways out of tenancies and housing situations for women fleeing violence, so the housing crisis stops functioning as a trap.
- Sustained investment in prevention and education, aimed at the attitudes that allow this violence to keep happening, not just the aftermath of it.
- A named minister or body held publicly accountable for the trend line year on year, the way we hold people accountable for road deaths or health targets.
None of this is radical. All of it has been recommended before, by advocates, by coroners, by Women’s Aid itself, again and again. What’s missing is not knowledge. What’s missing is political will sustained past the news cycle of any single case.
Say her name, and don’t look away
Jamey Carney was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother, somebody’s colleague and friend. Her death is not a data point. But it is also, undeniably, part of a pattern — 286 women deep now — that this island has the power to interrupt and has repeatedly chosen not to, not through malice, but through the quiet, dangerous comfort of treating each death as an isolated tragedy rather than the next entry in an ongoing national emergency.
Vigils and hashtags will follow, as they always do. They matter, but they are not enough, and everyone reading this already knows it. The only tribute that means anything now is a country that finally treats men’s violence against women with the urgency, funding, and sustained political attention it would give any other emergency killing this many people, year after year.
286 is not a ceiling. Without real change, it is just the number before the next one.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse:
- Ireland — Women’s Aid 24-Hour National Freephone Helpline: 1800 341 900, or womensaid.ie
- UK — National Domestic Abuse Helpline: 0808 2000 247
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