Ms Collette O'Regan:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak. I will just skim through my opening statement. LGBT Ireland is a national charitable organisation working to improve the visibility, inclusion and rights of LGBTI+ people living in Ireland and their families through our front-line support services. These services include national helplines, online chat and face-to-face and online peer support groups. We learn everything about our community and its members' struggles in accessing justice from these front-line services.

The LGBTI+ community is a target for hate crime and hate incidents. Our helpline deals with up to 2,000 contacts a year and there is a large amount of engagement through our peer support services. We have a lot of experience of hate crime and hate incidents. Some 4% of those contacting the helpline report violence but, anecdotally, we know that this low percentage does not reflect the true scale of homophobic, biphobic, lesbophobic and transphobic violence occurring in Ireland. This year's Pride season saw rainbow flags being burned in Waterford and Cork and vile homophobic graffiti on a very well-known gay bar in Dublin city. This can be seen as evidence of the impact of the online far-right, anti-LGBTI+ agenda coming more offline, onto our streets and into our communities and homes.

Research carried out on our community in 2016 showed high levels of fear of violence and of actual violence, with large percentages of people being threatened or physically assaulted. Approximately 20% of respondents had been physically assaulted, nearly 15% sexually assaulted and 6% attacked with a weapon because of being LGBT+. We can also see from that 2016 survey that a large percentage of our community felt very unsafe in publicly showing affection. They did not feel safe holding hands or showing any affection, which is completely contrary to the experience of our heterosexual peers. We see those levels of threats of violence and actual violence upheld in a 2019 survey carried out by the hate and hostility research group in the University of Limerick, with one in three respondents having been threatened with violence and one in five being physically attacked because of being LGBT+. There is a feeling in our community that this is the price of being visible and that we have to expect to endure living with this fear or to actually endure hate crime or hate attacks ourselves.

The legacy of the criminalisation of our community remains very strong. It presents a strong barrier to our engagement with An Garda Síochána. We welcome the organisation's national diversity and integration strategy for the period from 2019 to 2021, which focuses on its mission, "Keeping People Safe". This has led to renewed efforts towards engagement between ourselves and An Garda Síochána. However, there is a lot more work to do in respect of training because levels of reporting remain very low because the legacy of mistrust remains very strong. It has been there for far too long. It must also be noted that our community engages in activities which can result in ambiguity as to whether we can approach An Garda Síochána. Levels of addiction are high in our community. Chemsex forms part of its social scene. LGBTI+ young people are more likely to use drugs and alcohol and constitute a disproportionate share of the young homeless population. They are vulnerable to substance abuse, to rape and sexual assault and to engaging in prostitution as a means of supporting addictions and other dependencies. All of those issues make it quite difficult for members of our community to approach An Garda Síochána because of the legal issues around some of those aspects of LGBT culture.