Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

We are all aware of domestic violence through personal experience, visitors to our clinics, anecdotal evidence and information supplied to us by non-governmental agencies. Unfortunately, while we are aware that domestic violence occurs all too frequently in our society, we lack sufficient official statistics on it. We also lack an official infrastructure to deal with its effects. In its amendment to this timely and much-needed motion, the Government seems to be avoiding the central issue. The mechanisms we have as a society for dealing with domestic violence are far too dependent on Government actions which, of themselves, are too ad hoc, haphazard and akin to a Band-Aid solution and do not take a sufficiently long-term approach to deal with a deep-seated problem in our society.

We see this all too vividly with the pantomime that existed in respect of ongoing funding for the National Domestic Violence Intervention Agency, NDVIA. It should not have been a case that an NGO, which had been receiving support from the State but never on an multi-annual basis and never with an ongoing thought towards its own future despite the valuable work it was doing, had to make 16 requests to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform to seek the funding it needed to continue its work and received a response to that request at the eleventh hour, with that response being only a three-month reprieve. It is not good enough for the State to support vital agencies in this way. It gives the impression that the issue of domestic violence is of only half-hearted concern to this Government.

The lack of any type of real statistics on domestic violence and our dependence on statistics given to us by NGOs is a gap that should be filled as soon as possible. In 1999, Women's Aid pointed out that up to one in every five women experienced domestic violence. It has already been said in this debate that violence is largely of a physical nature. However, domestic violence can be and is verbal and psychological. It can and does involve women who are subjected to controlling means of whatever type. The fact that it exists at all in our society is a blight and the fact that it exists to such prevalence is a shame. It requires appropriate Government action to make sure the problem is tackled.

Despite the revelation of this statistic eight years ago, which we largely still use, there is little indication that the incidence and prevalence of domestic violence has changed at all in our society. That seems to indicate that the lack of an appropriate Government response has been one of the main factors.

The lack of resources for the various helplines has also been mentioned. The lack of people to man helplines very often means that victims cannot get a direct response on a real-time basis and contact with another human being who can help them through crises. We know that the Women's Aid national freephone helpline receives over 8,000 calls. One refuge in Rathmines deals with an average of ten emergency calls every day. The Garda domestic violence and sexual assault investigation unit receives an average of 6,000 calls per year. OSS Cork and Sexual Violence Centre Cork, which followed on from the Cork Rape Crisis Centre, would say that similar statistics exist in my own constituency and city. They are not statistics in which I take pride.

Apart from the funding crisis in the NDVIA provoked by the Government recently, there are scores of similar crises waiting to come to a head because of the lack of clear thinking by the Government in this area. This should be a problem which we could tackle with appropriate political will. It is certainly something we all have a responsibility to tackle, yet sadly all we get is muddled thinking and a lack of long-term vision.

Not only should we highlight the recent circumstances of the NDVIA, but we also need to point out that it has been and remains a pilot project. The use of the term "pilot project" by the Government in social interventions speaks volumes about its social policies in general and indicates that these are matters to which it needs to be seen to respond, but it never really gets to the bottom of these problems and never has the long-term vision needed to deal with them once and for all. I find this approach sad.

The pilot project was and is an innovative project. It could bear being turned into a mainstream project with a wider application throughout the country by State agencies such as the Garda Síochána, the Courts Service, the probation and welfare service, the HSE and the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. An interagency response involves doing things in an innovative way that would not otherwise happen, certainly would not with each of these State agencies on its own. It is hard to believe the crisis with the NDVIA occurred at all, given the organisation's great success in 2005 and 2006. There is a need for a political response as to how the Government allowed that situation to develop and a willingness to put in place a proper long-term response.

The wider issue of assisting victims of domestic violence is a cause for huge concern. The debate, quite properly, has involved the support structures which are under-resourced and need to be given greater strength. The real tragedy of domestic violence is the situations in which individual women — it is largely women who are affected — and their children find themselves. There is little to indicate that a wider support service is in place. The institutional barriers, the lack of appropriate bed and dwelling space and the attitude very often shown by officials in different State agencies do as much to entrench the violence these women experience in their domestic situation as they do to help them get away from it. While these attitudes persist, the ability to change to the extent required is probably further away than ever.

The Government will probably use the opportunity offered by this debate to sing its own praises, as it invariably does during Private Members' Business. I like to think it might use this opportunity for a more thoughtful approach which goes beyond the election in three months' time and might be slightly better than the regular type of report we see in this area, which ends up on a shelf with no action taken on foot of it. What we need to hear in this House is an honest response which admits the scale of the problem and then admits that the resources made available are still far from adequate, even if they have been increasing. Finally, we need to see a willingness to work with the entire political system to bring about the appropriate responses. At the end of the day, while there are many Government failings on this issue, it is really a failing of the political system itself. We have seen changes of Government and will probably see further changes in a few months' time. The question has to be whether those changes have any effect on the lives of the women who find themselves in situations of domestic violence and whether they will alter the position of the NDVIA and other organisations.

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