Dr. Cl?ona Saidl?ar:

I will speak again. I will elaborate on some of my opening statement. We have Article 10 of the Istanbul Convention, and the agency is Ireland's answer to that. The convention does country reports and Ireland is under review by the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, GREVIO, committee. Every now and then, it writes considerations of how countries have implemented the various articles and says whether their interpretations are wrong. Luckily for us, the GREVIO committee wrote a consideration on Article 10 in 2016 and was clear that a single agency to meet the need of Article 10 would not cut it. The committee wrote about how monitoring needed to be independent from implementation. Under the model Ireland has gone for, one agency will do the job and the agency will be controlled by or linked to the Minister. That means there will not be an independent element.

We can go in two directions. There are probably three or four options, actually, but I can only think of two right now. We can make the agency more independent and push it away from the Government. There are many good reasons for this agency to have such clout and coherence and for it to link to the Government, in that a clause in the legislation – "The Minister shall" – attaches the Government to the issue of DSGBV and will not allow the Minister to walk away from it in future. However, if that is our approach, then we need to build in something independent that handles monitoring. That does not exist in the current thought process, though, and there are no plans for it at the moment.