Sr. Brigid Tunney:

To pick up on Mr. O'Brien's comment on boarding schools, when I heard that we were establishing a boarding school when invited to start a secondary school in South Sudan 11 years ago, I was totally against it. I taught in a boarding school in Dublin and had a western mindset. On my first visit there, I encountered a girl in the primary school whose father was dead. She lived in a hut known as a tukel, which has a straw roof, etc., with her mother and brother. A boy armed with a rifle had broken into her hut the previous night and attempted to rape the girl but the mother clobbered him with a big stick and disarmed him. The girl went to school the next day and said nothing. Her mother came in later that day, told Sr. Orla the story and begged her to take the girl into the boarding school. I found that I had to divest myself of my very strongly held opinions. I looked at Sr. Orla and commented that it was not a boarding school; it was a safe haven or refuge for young women to get their education. Many people, including some donors, have a particular reaction when they realise we are establishing a boarding school or a hostel. We could not get funding for a hostel in a part of Kenya where the girls were living in awful conditions as we were establishing it in the area and beside our school. We eventually managed to get the money and open the hostel. It is full and those girls are getting an education. If they had to stay at home in their informal dwellings, they would not be able to attend school and would be in danger of violence, rape, etc. The hostel changed their lives completely. A similar situation pertains in South Sudan and probably in all the other countries to which Mr. O'Brien referred. The boarding schools are necessary to protect girls' safety, which is not the way that many in the West regard a boarding school.

The Deputy referred to clean water. Some of our funding comes from Irish Aid through Misean Cara. One of the most recent projects we financed was to sink three wells in the local community in order to shorten the distance women and girls had to travel to get water and increase their safety. The aid we receive is making a difference in people's lives. I thank the committee for that.