Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim míle buíochas and I send my best wishes to Senator O'Hara.

I congratulate the Deputy Leader on taking up the leadership of our party in the Seanad as well as assuming the role of Deputy Leader of the Seanad. I am delighted and say that from four years' experience of Senator Kyne being an extraordinary and very supportive colleague.

I rise today to ask for statements in this House with the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, who is the Minister in charge of the State counselling services but also of the funding of organisations such as the Rape Crisis Centre. There have been very disturbing reports of late in the newspapers and in public life of counselling notes being used in criminal trials. Let us look at the prospect of this. A woman is facing into the trial of someone who was raped her. In the course of that, she accesses counselling with the Rape Crisis Centre and that rapist gets to access her counselling notes, go through all the details and read everything with regard to how that affected her. There is a report from Paula Doyle in the newspapers today in which she describes how absolutely obscene and horrifically intrusive that was. Not only was she raped and had to face into a criminal trial, which is adversarial by its nature, and not only did he get that opportunity of violating her, he violated her again through the experiences and consequences of that rape by through reading her counselling notes and for those notes to be used in the defence in the prosecution of that person. I know from my years in counselling psychology that that is obscene.

Two things happen. Either people do not access counselling and we will have an increased rate of suicidal ideation, which is what the Rape Crisis Centre is saying, or the counsellors will be obliged to keep very limited notes, which is not supportive of their clients. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, is the Minister funding these services. We need to have statements in the House to flesh out what the problem would be in legislating to prevent their use as an evidentiary basis.