Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their presentations. This is a troubling area that we have to grapple with, and the Government and the Oireachtas have been trying to catch up following probably generations of under-emphasis of it. There was the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Gender Equality and we have been speaking about changes at this committee. Clearly, there have been recent controversies relating to the Defence Forces and toxic cultures there, and I am sure that if we were to conduct reviews into power imbalances in other State agencies we might find similar cultural issues. Within all this, what really troubles me is that somebody such as Andrew Tate will be an awful lot more powerful in the minds of young men than the likes of anything said here by any politician. We live in a country where women are being killed by men. Some people have difficulty getting their head around that and get very defensive in response to it, and they emphasise this idea it is "not all men" and all the rest of it. At least we are having a positive, constructive conversation as to how best we can grapple with this, and our guests are the people who deal with it every day.

They dealt with the refuge issue, but I am interested in what they were saying about the diversity issue within refuges, which we might touch on a little more. The board is going to be the key to the success or otherwise of the agency, to whether people trust and have faith in it or otherwise, and to whether it will last and enjoy robust engagement over a prolonged period. If the wording is problematic within the current draft, what kind of phraseology or changes to the draft would our guests be able to stand over, which we could then work with? That is what we are here to try to improve on.