Mr. Gerard Perry:

I will echo what Mr. Smyth and Mr. Ryan said. The FAI has a centralised system to record physical abuse, but not verbal abuse and that is very difficult. However, to get accurate data, we have to begin to define what we mean by abuse, whether it is verbal abuse or threats.

The international literature has struggled with that and I made reference to that in my submission. We all need a common language around what we mean by abuse. What one person perceives as abuse somebody else perceives to be background noise and he or she turns a deaf ear to it. We need to drill into definitions and collect hard data on verbal abuse and threats. That would be helpful in how we not only individually but collectively address this problem.