Senator Nicole Ryan told Behind the Story that when she was aged seven, her mother's former partner had come into their home one night armed with a knife.
The attack followed years of abuse against her mother.
"My mother saved our lives that night; she convinced him that it was her that he should take and so she did," she said.
"Prior to that we would have been in the same vicinity of my mother, there was all this chaos going on.
"She got stabbed but she convinced him to leave."
Senator Ryan told Katie and Fran she remembers cleaning up her mother’s blood following the attack.
"I remember very vaguely there was a lot of blood everywhere and I don’t remember cleaning it, but I know I did because when the guards came back, they had said I had cleaned so well that I almost compromised the crime scene.
"I was so scared that if he came back and if it wasn’t clean that we’d be in trouble."
The Sinn Féin politician recalls the kind of home they had lived in with her mother’s partner.
"Things like playing too loud, laughing too loud, the house not being clean enough – all that would lead to abuse for [my mother]," she said.
"So, I would try and mitigate that fact and just try to be as clean, as tidy and as quiet [as I could].
"I’d hold my breath – I do it all the time; I still do it today – because being silent meant that he might not see us and we’d be OK".
'Living in fear'
Senator Ryan spoke about the need to include the presence of children as an aggravating factor in sentencing for domestic violence.
"I think children aren’t factored into legislation sometimes," she explained.
"I know that there are so many children and families that are living in this kind of fear in this moment in time.
"It’s just to make sure that if a child is present in the domestic abuse – if they witness it, if they’re there -that should be an aggravating factor for sentencing."
Senator Ryan said she did not understand as a child that abuse can come in several forms.
"I would have grown up where I knew that physical violence was domestic abuse," she said.
"What I didn’t understand as I was growing up was that abuse comes in many forms – through coercion, through emotional abuse."
Senator Ryan said such abuse is not always visible.
"Initially the violence wasn’t evident; it’s slow – nobody shows you their true colours," she said.
"It started off maybe with a bit of controlling behaviour towards my mother and it would escalate into physical abuse over the years.
"We would live in a home [where] you were living on eggshells all of the time.
"I think back to that time and think, 'why didn’t I say anything?’ or ‘why didn’t I get help for my mother?’
"The threat to our lives was real – if I had said anything I knew that my mother could be killed.
"That was the reality of what we were living".
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Anyone affected by issues raised in this article can go to rte.ie/helplines
