Ms Abby Ryan:

I thank Ms Van Lieshout and the members. As noted by the Chair, I am the co-ordinator for the ICGBV.

We are a slightly unique organisation in that we are made up of government and civil society organisations working in the international development and humanitarian space to increase our learning and understanding on the issue of gender-based violence, GBV, and improve our programming across the more than 50 countries in which our members work. We also go out into the world to speak about GBV and to try to target policy change, especially at UN level. We are made up of 13 members. As I said, Irish Aid and the Defence Forces are the Government representatives. We also have 11 of the NGOs that are based in Ireland, including the very big ones such as GOAL, Concern and Trócaire, and the very small ones such as the Ifrah Foundation, which is a two-person team working on the issue of female genital mutilation, FGM, in Somalia. We run the gamut in the Irish international, development and humanitarian space.

We are currently working on our strategic plan, which came into effect last year. We focused on three key areas: increasing the work on GBV prevention programming; response programming; and risk mitigation. We have lots of activities going on, including many learning sessions. This year, we focused quite strongly on GBV and climate change. We have produced a policy paper on the interconnected impacts of GBV and climate change and we had a session with the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN this year, which included people form the Solomon Islands and Columbia who spoke to what was happening in their communities regarding GBV and climate change and how they were impacted. We do a lot of work on disability inclusion within GBV programming and try to improve the inclusion of people with disabilities in the work our members are doing. We have also done a lot of work on psychosocial support and, again, try to improve our members' programming on such support and provide that space for them to learn from each other.

When Ireland took a seat on the UN Security Council last year, we saw a key opportunity to deepen our work on women, peace and security, with Ireland taking a co-chair position on the informal expert group on women, peace and security. In that moment, we reached out to colleagues in the Department to see how we might be able to bring about a situation where we would have some sessions with departmental officials, and women from countries that were coming up for discussion, on what the realities are for women and girls around the world are on women, peace and security. We have had eight sessions so far on Haiti, Myanmar, Afghanistan and, most recently, Sudan. We held these sessions under the Chatham House Rule because for many of the women who came forward to speak there were severe questions regarding their safety and security if they were very public about what they said, but they found a great moment to have real conversations with colleagues from the Department about the reality in their countries.

In Myanmar, for example, we have heard that many of the organisations and women that spoke out about what was happening there had to flee their countries. The reprisals, not only on them, as individuals, but also on their organisations in terms of violence and cutting of funding, have been so severe that most of them have had to leave. We have heard that in Columbia, even now after the peace process, women are facing high levels of violence and indigenous women, in particular, have a real fear of being killed for speaking out about what is happening in their communities. We heard from colleagues in Afghanistan that limitations on the freedom of movement of women there have had significant impacts, not only on their access to education, but their ability to engage in employment. Many of the women's rights organisations, or women-led organisations, have had to consider closing, if not actually close, because their staff simply cannot get to work. We are hearing about many major issues regarding how repression in women's lives means they are struggling to engage in their communities.

I will leave it there for now and pass over to my colleague, Mr. Sadlier, who will talk about some of the recommendations for today.