In the Republic of Ireland, a landmark piece of domestic violence reform legislation named for a young Dublin mother killed by her former partner has been formally signed into law, turning a family’s devastating grief into a systemic change designed to prevent future femicides.
In April 2021, 24-year-old Jennifer Poole – a mother of two young children – was fatally stabbed seven times by her ex-partner Gavin Murphy in her Dublin home. Murphy, who would later plead guilty to murder and receive a life sentence in 2022, held a concealed violent criminal history: in 2015, he had served two years in prison for a knife attack on a previous partner and her mother. When Poole began dating Murphy in 2020, neither she nor her family had any knowledge of this prior domestic violence conviction. Covid-19 restrictions limited the family’s contact with Murphy early in the relationship, and by the time Poole began showing unexplained bruises and withdrawing from her loved ones, the harm was already escalating. One week before her murder, Poole had ended the relationship, but Murphy attacked her before she could escape the danger he posed.
Jason Poole, Jennifer’s brother, has spent nearly five years campaigning tirelessly for reform after his sister’s death. He rejected the idea that Jennifer would become just another overlooked statistic in Ireland’s crisis of gender-based violence, and began meeting with lawmakers to draft proposals for greater transparency around domestic violence offenders. On Tuesday, that campaign reached its milestone when the Domestic Violence (Judgements) Register Bill 2026 – widely known as Jennie’s Law – was approved by Ireland’s Dáil parliament and signed into law by President Catherine Connolly.
Unlike the UK’s Clare’s Law, a “right to ask” framework that allows potential victims to request police disclosure of a partner’s abusive history but has faced criticism for inconsistent disclosure, Jennie’s Law establishes a fully public, searchable register hosted on the Irish Courts Service website. All offenders convicted of domestic violence against a current or former romantic partner will be added to the register, with the caveat that victims must provide written consent before a perpetrator’s name is published – a provision designed to center survivor autonomy and safety. Jason Poole emphasized that this transparency would have saved his sister’s life: if the register had existed in 2020, Jennifer would have never entered the relationship that killed her, and his family would have never had to lay her to rest in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery.
“Now we have a legacy that her children will know that their mummy didn’t die in vain,” Jason Poole told reporters. “It’s to support victims, it’s to support families that are not going to have to suffer like we have had to suffer and continue to suffer, because we didn’t know how we could help Jennifer, we didn’t know his past.” For Jason, the passage of the law marks the end of a long, painful campaign, and opens the door for him to finally process his grief: “I am literally a brother who had no choice but to go and see their sister being laid into the ground because of failures in a system that wasn’t there to protect her. And now that those systems are there, hopefully the less work I’ll have to do and I can get on and actually start my grief.”
The reform has already drawn attention across the Irish border, where domestic violence advocates are calling for Northern Ireland to adopt a similar public register framework. Nuala Lappin, a former domestic violence officer with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told *The Nolan Show* that Jennie’s Law is far more proactive than the region’s existing Clare’s Law-style framework. “It empowers victims and potential victims to find out for themselves and make those decisions early on; Clare’s Law in my view is more reactive than preventative,” Lappin said. Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long responded that officials are “closely” watching the implementation of Jennie’s Law in the Republic of Ireland, and are keeping an open mind to adopting similar legislation, noting that policymakers will need to carefully evaluate issues of proportionality around public disclosure of offender details before moving forward.