Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this motion and I commend the Social Democrats for bringing it forward. Adopting a zero-tolerance approach to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence is absolutely crucial in the context of what we have seen in recent times. Every week there seems to be another issue of violence against women or undermining of women in their sporting careers, their workplace, or when they are socialising in our society. In this country, 52% of women have experienced sexual violence. This is the majority of women in this country. It is endemic that those women who feel they can come forward to report sexual violence to An Garda Síochána are totally failed by our legal system. This is a deep failure of our society. It cannot be claimed there is a zero-tolerance approach if it cannot be guaranteed that a person in a position of power or trust, who has been put there or licensed by the State, to whom a woman goes to does not have a conviction for sexual assault. We license taxi drivers and dentists but yet we have not regulated those licensed to keep women safe. That is just not good enough.

I wish to highlight the lack of refuges in this country. If we do not deal with this issue, we are accepting the fact that we are tolerating domestic violence in this country. Nine counties have no refuges. Under the Istanbul Convention, we need at least 512 new refuge places to fulfil the target of one family refuge for every 10,000 people. This is far above the planned 280 places. That is just not good enough. At the launch of Cuan earlier this year, the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, said we had to realistic about how many refuges we could create in the next three years. Being realistic when the lack of refuge space built by the State is combined with a housing crisis caused by lack of public funding by the State and a rise in domestic violence rates shows a series of failures by the State to protect women. The Mercy Law Resource Centre report last year into social housing and domestic violence shows domestic violence as one of the leading causes of homelessness. Despite this, the Government does not record those families in the homelessness data. They are not considered.

I wish also to raise the issue of section 19(a) of the Criminal Evidence Act 1992 which has been raised by several people. There are serious questions in most cases of the validity of counselling records. Counselling records are third parties' opinion of something told to them confidentially. They are the counsellors' perception of their clients' state of mind and not a recounting of events. I am asking the Minister and the Taoiseach to repeal section 19(a) of the Criminal Evidence Act 1992. I ask the Minister to state before recess tomorrow when and how it is going to be repealed.

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