Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein)
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917. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the cost of reinstating core funding to the Rape Crisis Network Ireland. [12921/16]

Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
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Tusla, the Child and Family Agency has statutory responsibility for the care and protection of victims of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, whether in the context of the family or otherwise.

In 2015, Tusla made a decision not to renew funding for Rape Crisis Network Ireland. Tusla had previously provided funding of €184,000 to the Rape Crisis Network in 2014.

The funding provided to Rape Crisis Network Ireland by Tusla up to 2014 included provision for the maintenance and development of a database, incorporating data gathered and recorded by rape crisis centres dealing with the survivors of sexual abuse. Tusla was concerned that the database was not representative of all Rape Crisis Centres and because of difficulties experienced by Tusla in accessing data for routine reporting and service planning purposes, funding was not renewed.

Both the Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) and the EU Victim’s Directive set out clear obligations on parties/Member States to collect data for reporting purposes. Also, the Second National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender Based Violence published by Cosc - The National Office for the Prevention of Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence (Department of Justice and Equality) - sets out expectations of core data to be collected by all agencies under the strategy. In the context of Tusla’s statutory obligations to both adults and children, it is important that the Agency has fully functional information systems that satisfy its evolving needs.

Tusla, as the statutory body with responsibility for domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, made a decision to develop its own comprehensive dataset for these services and Tusla has now commenced work on the development of this dataset.

As part of revised governance arrangements, funded sexual violence services will provide information directly to Tusla, creating, for the first time, a comprehensive dataset on all such services funded by the Agency. This information and evidence is critically important as Tusla continues to reform services to ensure the best possible response is provided to survivors of domestic, sexual and gender based violence.