Ms Louise Synnott:

To follow on from what Mr. O'Connor said, unfortunately, I do not have numbers for incidents occurring specifically in direct provision centres. Covid has provided an opportunity and a growth industry for domestic violence in family homes. We have worked very closely with Women's Aid and other agencies in the community, as well as the Department, in raising awareness of opportunities where domestic violence and a range of abuses can occur, and have been occurring, during Covid.

On direct provision centres and what Mr. Dhala said, again, it is about information, working within those communities and, from a policing perspective, overcoming barriers to allow reporting. It is also about highlighting cultural differences to enable women and men in direct provision and communities to make reports and feel comfortable in reporting to a policing agency. Police services around the world do not necessarily have the relationship we have with communities in respect of providing community-based policing. It is about providing information and opening doors. We have diversity liaison officers, who used to be called ethnic liaison officers, whose details are available on the Garda website. They are working with direct provision centres and diverse communities to provide information and awareness and to create opportunities to report abuse and violence.

Our most recent statistics show that for the duration of Covid we have, through our callback systems on domestic abuse calls, created almost 35,000 contacts with victims of domestic abuse, where they had the opportunity to perhaps report further incidents they may not have reported to us if we had not been there to make contact with them. We noted an increase of 29% in detection of incidents where domestic abuse was a motive. I am not sure if that answers the questions or if there are further questions arising from that.