Ah I know they say don’t given them oxygen but read the last line of the article by Ruadhán Mac Cormaic on the latest reaction on the possible merger of the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission. Laugh? Oh I giggled merrily otherwise if I had really spent time shouting at the screen I could have done myself an injury.

AMEN have been a bit quiet of late, nothing to do with Rachel O’Reilly or Siobhan Kearney or any of the 90 women killed in their own homes in the past decade per chance?

…However, Mary Cleary, the founder of the support group Amen, said the importance of some equality groups may have reduced, adding: “It’s mostly human rights for women we’re talking about here anyway.”

“I would imagine there probably was a good reason to set up the Equality Authority when it was set up. However, maybe they have fulfilled whatever they set out to do,” she said.

Ms Cleary also claimed that violence against women had become a “huge industry” that commanded funding of some €30 million a year.

“I do believe that that remit has been expanded to include anything that causes any displeasure to any woman in the country . . . It’s about banging doors and throwing the odd tea cup or whatever you do. It’s about a bad Monday or a bad Friday or whatever day of the week it happens to be sometimes,” she continued.

“But the slamming of a door or the banging of the tea cup, I would not interpret that as domestic violence.”

According to the Equality Authority’s annual report for 2007, approximately 50 per cent of cases taken across all nine grounds of the Equal Status Acts last year were taken by men.