Ms Mary McDermott:

I am the CEO of Safe Ireland. I am joined virtually by my good colleague, Ms Lisa Marmion, who is our national services development manager. We thank the committee for the invitation to speak today on the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly. We give our very great thanks, even more importantly, to our fellow citizens for their recognition that domestic, sexual and gender-based violence creates and maintains conditions of gender inequality in Ireland. It must, therefore, be central to all considerations of the equality and freedom of all.

We frame our presentation today not only in the context of meeting the requirements of the Istanbul Convention, but also in the context of the publication of the report of the Citizens' Assembly, the national audit of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence infrastructures, the Tusla audit of domestic violence accommodation, the current draft of the third national strategy on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence and, crucially, the Taoiseach’s very welcome decision to create a new statutory agency for domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

The overriding frame for Safe Ireland, however, retains the effects and the insights of Covid-19 on our society in relation to domestic violence, the strong reassertion of the importance and capacity of local communities and the effectiveness of co-ordinated Government and civil society engagement. The importance of locally accessible domestic violence services cannot be overstated. Equally, the redrawing of the relations between work and home, the private and the public and the use of IT, all of which are embodied here today, are directly pertinent to responding to domestic violence in a progressive, 21st century manner.

I do not need to rehearse here the public reaction to the murders of Urantsetseg Tserendorj and Ashling Murphy. In particular, Ashling’s death removed every possible victim-blaming variable that we usually use to distract ourselves from the scale of violence against women in our society. We remember them here and we work on behalf of all women who are deprived of their lives and their freedom. As such, we are done with endlessly describing this problem. We welcome this moment in our history when we can actually accept that domestic, sexual and gender-based violence is a large-scale social problem. We can name it accurately and we can act to address it. We have encountered focused, persistent and positive engagement from all sectors over the last two years. The question now is about how we proceed. It is a welcome starting place for us.

On the point of naming, language and the conceptualisation of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, Safe Ireland’s core position, which is bolstered by decades of robust feminist and queer scholarship, is that this form of violence is a large-scale social problem. It may not be reduced to poor personal choice. We concur with Mr. Kelly Ryan's observations on the need to broaden that issue. It is a cornerstone social problem. We believe that if it is addressed centrally and systematically, many ancillary and problematic personal, social, political and administrative culs-de-sac in areas like mental health, addictions, homelessness, persistent criminality, child protection, education and employment and alienation of all kinds can be worked through. All of these factors bring significant evidenced costs to our State, our communities and our personal lives. All of them would be seriously repositioned if domestic, sexual and gender-based violence was placed centrally in our social policy. I might add that the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, and Safe Ireland are working on a project to that end.

Our colleagues in Women’s Aid, the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland and Dublin Rape Crisis Centre have presented substantively on recommendations 37 to 41, inclusive, of the Citizens' Assembly, which relate to awareness, justice and FGM. We will not input heavily into these areas today. We are happy to engage on these matters, but we will not repeat the previous inputs. We defer significantly to our colleague in AkiDwA on the matter of FGM, as already addressed this morning.

I will make a brief input on social protection and domestic, sexual and gender-based violence supports. Our submission covers this aspect of the matter under the heading of “pathways to freedom and the importance of social protection”. A woman's journey out of coercion and, in particular, financial control, often requires her to be supported by the State to regain her independence and her agency. Over the last two years, Safe Ireland has worked positively with the Department of Social Protection to develop such dedicated pathways. We commend the work of Deputies and Senators on this, particularly their cross-party support in 2020 for the domestic violence rent supplement. This important pilot, which has now been mainstreamed, demonstrates some of the important gaps which continuously exist for women who are exiting abuse. As a follow-on, we are now calling for a similar protocol for the exceptional needs payment to assist women who have other practical emergency outlays and are experiencing domestic violence.

In 2020 and 2021, Safe Ireland administered a charitable Covid-19 emergency fund through our member services to support women on their exit from abusive homes to purchase essential items, including nappies, bread and milk, to pay bills and to travel to and from school and work. The outlays funded here are fully documented and they provide a solid base of evidence for mainstream support through our Government for the exceptional needs payment. We will be pushing for this campaign in 2022.

We are aware of a structural barrier that confronts qualified adults who are seeking to access dental, optical and audiology services through the treatment benefit scheme. Practitioners are required to solicit the consent of the perpetrator in order for an injured woman to be treated. We will be seeking support from the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, and the data protection commissioner to remedy this anomaly.

Recommendations 37 and 40 address the appropriate political and administrative structures which plan, design, provide and resource domestic violence preventions and interventions in Ireland, including the equitable provision of refuge across the country. It is very important for us in this forum that we decided to keep services and structures together in our considerations. This is because they are, in our opinion, completely interdependent. On recommendation 37, which involves domestic, sexual and gender-based violence structures, we welcome the significant progress that has been made with the integration of services and policy into a single Ministry with oversight within the Department of the Taoiseach. This is an important element for us. The proposed establishment of a new agency is also very welcome. It provides great opportunity for cutting-edge responses. However, Safe Ireland strongly cautions that we ensure this new structure does not repeat the difficulties of previous iterations.

There is an absolute necessity for a dedicated domestic, sexual and gender-based violence infrastructure in Ireland. We cannot stress this enough. Mixed models or the shoehorning of domestic violence into existing structures will, in our opinion, simply repeat the problems all these changes seek to avoid.

The importance of robust and fully integrated national, regional and local community co-ordinated responses to domestic violence cannot be overstated. Regional and community level implementation of the third national strategy arising from this new agency should be driven, managed, and co-designed by the existing cross-disciplinary expertise in the front-line services sector, which already exists, alongside the significant DSGBV specialisms that exist in allied public service professions including policing, healthcare, social services and academia.

The task of the Citizens’ Assembly was to examine gender equality through a rights-based lens. It follows, therefore, that women and all victims must be visible at the forefront of structural response. In this matter, we ask for an open and public process with appropriate terms of reference to guide all these processes. We note with concern that the current proposal in the draft of the third national strategy for regional co-ordination does not support such a model. The organisation chart on page 18 of the draft proposes to charge the existing children and young people’s services committees, CYPSC, with responsibility for regional implementation of domestic violence for women and girls. We strongly suggest this is inappropriate. It is not a structure that Safe Ireland can support. Such positioning simultaneously reinforces sexist stereotypes, repeats previous difficulties in the structural positioning of domestic violence and erases and infantilises the status of women and the violence they experience. We deserve structures in our own right. It is not a fit structure for the significant challenges ahead. We call again for the development of a coherent national services development plan.

I will briefly move on to services. Again, keeping the provision of services and the structures within which they operate in view, we welcome the development of 21st century refuge, quality front-line services and competent communities across the country. Here, again, we stress that crisis accommodation through refuge is not of itself a solution to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence generally, nor is it even, indeed, to the full accommodation and support needs of women in their journey to freedom. Whilst refuge can provide protective respite for a number of weeks, the journey to safety for a woman can take up to two years. We must ensure the ongoing availability of refuge spaces for women in crisis but they must be fully supported pathways to transitional and permanent housing accommodation. These must be in place.

As we know, national housing policy does not even recognise women in domestic violence circumstances as homeless. This is an outrage. Therefore, they fall substantially outside the net of current interventions and priorities. Other jurisdictions, and my colleague, Ms Marmion, will speak to this in detail if required by the committee, have successfully addressed these issues in the round. The whole housing approach, for example, offers such a model, which addresses the housing and safety needs of victims and survivors in the UK. This framework consolidates all the main housing tenure types, housing options and support initiatives that are needed to help women fleeing domestic abuse to either maintain or access safe and stable housing. The framework could be adapted and for the most part provides a tailored plug-in to existing housing policy to address the current deficit. On the matter of women staying at home and needing safe at-home shelter, we also support this process. We note that while the first option is that the perpetrator be removed from her home, however, there are also instances where due to the cultural pressure of family, friends or, indeed, the community as a whole, a woman must flee her home. We will, therefore, always need these mobile flexible accommodation responses.

With regard to the development of refuge across the country which, of course, pertains to the publication of the Tusla accommodation review and the identified areas in our country that have no refuge provision and do not meet the requirements of the Istanbul Convention, again, we urge careful planning to maximise the opportunity to create a 21st century response to domestic violence at local level. This is a moment in history that we do not wish to squander.

By way of proposing possible future-proofed models for refuge, in 2020, Safe Ireland drew up what we called then the Sovereignty Project, noting that freedom is the absolute twin of safety. The core concept here is that future refuge would be built on three principles, the first of which is safe spaces. All refuge spaces would be accessible and trauma-informed, with contemporary design principles that are fully integrated with wraparound services and, vitally, a community interface. The second is that best practice would specify good quality standards for front-line services and practitioners based on local expertise and-or international best practice. Third, an additional prong to this development, which we suggest in the Sovereignty Project, is domestic violence-centred community development and engagement. This novel element would specify a model to lead the development of competent, safe communities that can prevent and respond to violence against women and girls, giving them confidence and clarity in how to handle this problem at a personal, familial, local and community level. The project is under way and we will launch it in October 2022. We will deliver at that time a safe spaces toolkit including these three elements for communities and services, which we offer as a guide and support for refuge development locally, either as a new-build or with the help of retrofit. We must thank our donors, the Community Foundation for Ireland, for funding this important piece of work. Its patience while we awaited the accommodation review's publication and its confidence in Safe Ireland's expertise is really appreciated. Indeed, Tusla also recently supported our work here, which is also welcome.

Safe Ireland’s recommendations to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Gender Equality on its considerations of the report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality are quite simple: create a dedicated domestic, sexual and gender-based violence infrastructure at every level; develop existing expertise and domestic, sexual and gender-based violence structures; develop a coherent accommodation response in order to support a functioning refuge capacity using, for example, a whole housing approach; and create a well-planned and well-designed model of community domestic violence refuge and support services across the country, which can transform our communities' responses and enable and empower them to deal with this large-scale social problem. We welcome the committee's questions. If we are unable to respond we will, of course, provide members with what they wish. I thank the committee very much.