Dr. Cl?ona Saidl?ar:

To add to what Ms Counihan has said, this is not in any way novel to us. I cannot obviously guarantee that in future barristers will not be barristers and they will not do what barristers do best, which is their job. We have been doing it for a very long time and, indeed, we have been providing legal advice just as Ms Counihan has outlined. We also provide a number of other things. From our point of view, this is about being survivor centred, and about survivors' and victims' rights. There are set protocols. For example, with the sexual assault treatment unit, SATU, we have what we call the three pillars of the Garda forensics side, the health side and then the advocacy side. We have written protocols about how the different professions operate together. We have not really got where we are acting here in terms of legal advice. We also do court and Garda accompaniment. We have run the national programme of court and Garda accompaniment for 15 if not 20 years so this is not novel to us at all in terms of how we know the role we are playing and how we do not get ourselves into anything; that is about training and having a national standardised training programme.

I want to reiterate something Ms Counihan said earlier. It is the case that for the victim of sexual violence it is not their case and so there will be times, which we hope are rare, when the interests of the State in prosecuting will not align with the interests of the victim and the victim has rights to have that legal advice.