George Lawlor (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to support this motion. I thank Deputy Coppinger for bringing it forward. I welcome our guests in the Public Gallery.

I want to speak about the importance of women having access to refuge places. As a member of the voluntary board of management and a director of Wexford Women's Refuge, I have seen at first hand the benefit of having in a locality a refuge in which skilled and compassionate staff are available to guide victims through the difficulties involved and to advise them on some of the obstacles and issues that are highlighted in the motion. For five years, I chaired the building subgroup of Wexford Women's Refuge. Last year, we opened a new state-of-the-art building in the heart of Wexford town that tripled the capacity of the refuge. The refuge offers outreach services by meeting women in a safe place of their choosing. It offers: court accompaniment; access to counselling; works closely with Wexford Rape Crisis and agencies such as Barnardos, Youth New Ross and the HSE, to name but a few of the great services available to vulnerable women and their children.

An in-house child and family support worker is just one the highly skilled staff available in the refuge. Despite all of this, staff at the refuge are put to the pin of their collar and often find it impossible to keep up with the workload and the demands on the service. Despite this, County Wexford can consider itself lucky to be in a position to have a refuge. Sadly, nine counties - Cavan, Carlow, Laois, Leitrim, Longford, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon and Sligo - are devoid of domestic violence refuge accommodation. The Wexford refuge gets multiple requests from outside the county for accommodation. It is almost constantly operating at full capacity. This is despite the almost tripling of capacity last year. Imagine the feeling of isolation the women in these counties experience when from knowing that they do not have access to the safe haven of a refuge in their communities or localities.

As the motion states, only 5% of those who experience sexual violence as an adult report it to An Garda. It is estimated that just 14% of the cases of those who do report such violence make it to trial. The victims and survivors of sexual violence have spoken about their harrowing experiences of the legal system. Ludicrously, accused persons have the right to request access to the counselling records of complainants. We must put an end to this invasive and traumatic allowance for perpetrators. We must support the call from the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality in 2021 for the exclusion of counselling and medical records from evidence. That is the very least we can do to support the victims of this heinous crime.

See this speech in context