Ms Mary McDermott:

Safe Ireland is a co-ordinating body for 38 independent front-line domestic violence services across the country, 20 of which operate 21 staffed refuges, while others operate safe and transitional housing. All members of Safe Ireland provide a front-line specialist response to women and children who experience coercive control and abuse. Our single call today is for a fully-integrated and resourced Government response to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

We thank the committee for the invitation to present on the pressing issue of emergency accommodation for those experiencing violence and control. We commend the committee's initiative and we hope that the evidence we present to the members will also be made available to their colleagues on the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We wrote this submission on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence within the terms of reference set out by the committee. Therefore, our starting point is a direct statement that Ireland’s domestic violence response infrastructure, and in particular its accommodation infrastructure, is critically deficient. These deficiencies place women and children at very real risk of grievous trauma, injury or fatality. We have set out the wider context within which emergency accommodation must be analysed and where solutions must be developed. All inquiry must attend to the absolute necessity for wraparound services to be integral to responses at every point of a woman’s journey to freedom. The limitations of examining emergency accommodation itself in isolation from a whole housing approach cannot be overstated. An important qualification here is that we still await the publication of the Tusla audit of domestic violence accommodation, which was due for release in the first quarter of 2021. Safe Ireland and our member organisations worked closely with Tusla in that process over two years, and we are eager to respond to the audit’s findings.

While the collection of data on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence is an ongoing problem at a national level, some statistics may help to frame this large-scale social problem. In the context of contact with front-line services between March and December 2020, there were more than 57,000 calls to local and national helplines. During this time, on average each month more than 2,000 women and 500 children sought support, 6,000 new women made contact and 216 requests were made for emergency accommodation. Between March and August 2020 alone, there were 1,351 unmet requests for refuge. Without the introduction of the innovative domestic violence rent supplement, which Safe Ireland members lobbied for, and without the corporate assistance of Airbnb, which made hotel beds available for use as refuge, outcomes for women and children would have been much more serious.

Figures relevant to this committee may also help to frame this issue. In 2020, a total of 23,785 incidents were reported to An Garda Síochána, with 4,000 breaches of protective orders recorded. It is the case that the first line of support for women and children experiencing domestic abuse must be immediate access to protective services to prevent further harm. At a minimum, this must also include immediate direction to safe supported accommodation, appropriate information, access to judicial protection and access to therapeutic supports, all of which are provided by Safe Ireland member organisations across the country. Our pre-budget submission called for increases in core funding for front-line wraparound support services, for capital investment in refuges, for safe-at-home sanctuary schemes and for safe and transitional housing.

We again reiterate our primary call for a truly integrated strategy for domestic, sexual and gender-based violence in Ireland and for the responsibility for national policy and services to be housed within one Ministry. I and Ms Marmion will be happy to take questions, and if the committee members have any queries which require further clarification, we will respond to them in writing within the week. I thank the committee.