Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 November 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Women's Shelters and Domestic Abuse Refuges: Discussion

Ms Alison Graham:

I thank Ms McDermott. I wish to respond as well, if I may. I spoke earlier about how domestic violence refuges have developed over the years from community activists fundraising and trying to find money. There has not been a dedicated response from the Government or the Department. Then, unfortunately, your service gets split out into different sections and so on and you are looking to this place for this and that place for that. Several of us have reporting structures to different Departments, which is time-consuming, resource-intensive, etc. It does not lead to a standard approach to the services provided. Women go to refuges across the country and their experience of one refuge may be different from their experience of another because the policy and the service provision will be different, even down to how long they can stay. That is a big challenge in how we provide those services. A dedicated Department to look at this is what is needed; otherwise, we will continue as we are, a lot of the time trying to develop these services out of what is there and what we can scrape together. That is not the future we want for the provision of domestic violence services.

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