Ms Alison Graham:

On the cost of establishing and running a refuge, from our experience, the majority of refuges across the country grew out of community groups or activists coming together because there was not a strong departmental approach or a dedicated budget in the past to provide capital funding to establish refuges. We opened the Rathcoole refuge in south Dublin at the end of 2019. The cost for building that came from the capital assistance scheme funding through the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We had to approach to Tusla to fund the staffing and running costs of the refuge. There is not a single pot of money that organisations can access in order to establish and run refuges. That is the main problem that many refuges, particularly in rural areas, struggle with because of the nature of the system. There is not one Department to which they can go for support that will help develop a refuge from scratch and help run it in the future.