Ms Ivanna Youtchak:

I thank the Chair and members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice for the opportunity to meet it to present on the proposed general scheme of the domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, DSGBV, agency Bill. The National Women’s Council, NWC, is the leading national women’s membership organisation. The National Women's Council represents and derives its mandate from its membership, which includes over 190 groups and organisations from a diversity of backgrounds, sectors and locations across Ireland. The National Women's Council also chairs and convenes the National Observatory on Violence Against Women. The observatory is an independent network of 22 grassroots and national organisations that come together regularly to monitor progress on DSGBV in Ireland.

NWC strongly welcomes the establishment of the agency as it will provide new co-ordination and a clear structure with a wide range of crucial functions for delivering on the Government strategy on DSGBV. For the purposes of this brief presentation, we will focus on two key points of the National Women's Council submission that we consider vital for the agency to effectively and efficiently deliver a zero-tolerance approach to DSGBV. It is important to highlight that the discussion about this Bill is taking place in the context of Ireland adopting a number of crucial international obligations and instruments, as well as multiple policy and legal changes in the past decades. This Bill is an important step towards addressing DSGBV and it would be greatly strengthened by acknowledging via a preamble or Long Title the importance of this agency, including its purpose to promote zero tolerance, and recalling the Istanbul Convention and key international obligations to combat DSGBV adopted by Ireland, as part of a broader framework of fundamental human rights obligations.

With regard to ensuring inter-agency collaboration, the third national strategy acknowledges that a whole-of-government approach involving all the relevant Departments, agencies and bodies is necessary to respond to DSGBV. For this agency to be effective in its functions, cross-departmental and multi-agency co-operation must be enabled by strong legislation, accompanied by a recognition of the role and commitments to meet their responsibilities. Without this in place, we risk repeating errors from the past, such as fragmentation of policy development, service delivery competencies between different agencies, and dispersion of responsibilities across multiple Government Departments.

Therefore, the National Women's Council recommends, with regard to the functions of the agency, that it shall have all such powers as are necessary for the performance of its functions to oblige all public service bodies to fulfil obligations under agreed DSGBV strategies, policy and legislation. On the issue of data collection and analysis, the Bill currently limits the agency’s function to assist only in the development of statistical information. The implementation plan of the third national strategy clearly gives a stronger and leading role to this agency. Systematic and adequate collection of disaggregated data is crucial to inform the legal and policy frameworks, which Ireland did not fulfil under its second national policy. Therefore, the National Women's Council recommends that the agency co-ordinates the establishment and implementation of a gold standard of data collection and analysis by all relevant public service bodies, with the support of specialists and civil society organisations.

The second crucial point that we would like to highlight focuses on the participation of civil society organisations, CSOs-----