Sorry, a Cheann Comhairle. Is the speech available?

Sentiment score: -0.04

Sorry, on a point of order -----

Sentiment score: -0.08

----- this speech was sent out by Deputy Michael Lowry yesterday -----

Sentiment score: 0.00

----- to a constituent. We should have it here.

Sentiment score: 0.00

It was.

Sentiment score: 0.00

It was sent out yesterday by Deputy Michael Lowry to people.

Sentiment score: 0.00

If Deputy Lowry had it yesterday, the rest of us who are in here for the debate should have it.

Sentiment score: 0.00

And it is not off the cuff.

Sentiment score: 0.00

I welcome the survivors, therapists and campaigners who have come to the Dáil today, including those who have campaigned on the issue of an amnesty for same-sex relations crime in the past. I do not know if they are still here. The issue in this Bill that has dominated is that of the use of counselling notes. There are many survivors here today. I cannot mention them all but will mention a few. Some of those who played a role are here. I will mention Hazel Behan, the only survivor who got to testify in front of the justice committee. That was the Minister's pre-legislative scrutiny. Paula Doyle is here today and has also played a key role in talking to TDs and Senators. I want to mention others who the Minister met. Sarah Grace has campaigned on this for many years and has played a leading role in highlighting this in the last number of years. I know the Minister met Ciara Mangan and Donna McCarthy as well. The Minister has spoken to survivors, but I am afraid he has not listened to what they had to say. I also want to mention the therapists who have played a key role in the past year in particular on this issue. Barbara Kelly is a psychotherapist and set up an organisation, Therapists Against Harm, on foot of what has happened. Therapists are no longer willing to go along with this abuse of their clients. While one of the previous speakers talked about welcoming this, this is not welcomed by any of the professional bodies. The Psychology Society of Ireland and all of the therapist groups have called for a ban on this completely, as have many others who I will mention again. I am going to begin with the counselling notes and I will mention other things that are in the Bill. I think it is a shame. Somebody said that the Minister was giving out. We did not say he had to put everything into one law. He can pass laws. Some of these things should not be together and should be distinct. There should be a Bill to outlaw victim blaming and all the abuse and misogynistic practices that are going on in the courts. The counselling notes issue should be dealt with separately. It is too big an issue. It should not be put in with other things that are good in the Bill and that people want to vote for. There are also things that are bad in the Bill, such as the proposal to introduce pepper spray into overcrowded prisons and so on. I want to mention the counselling notes first. This week, Margaret Loftus stood outside a court and told us that the legal system had done as much damage to her as the violence she faced. It is yet another survivor telling us this. One of the big reasons that people do not bother reporting or prosecuting, and that attrition rates are so low in terms of these trials, are practices like this - people having to have their private thoughts used against them. Every woman in the country is wondering what is the point of prosecuting a case in this country, particularly when they see the likes of what happened this week. Margaret Loftus, who was a garda, could not even get justice. A former woman garda could not get justice against the boys' club in the gardaí. That is what happened. The Minister spoke about "balance". There is no balance. Sexual violence is nearly an unprosecuted crime. That is the reality. There is so much of it that does not even get talked about or reported and then there is the level that is prosecuted. What about that balance? We need to rebalance in favour of victims and survivors. The Minister is from a barrister background and I fear that he is imbued in the status quo of the Judiciary. I really feel that because he has been told again and again about this issue. It is a rarefied place where there is routine victim blaming. It is male dominated and very privileged. The Judiciary is privileged - I am sorry - and the Minister does not seem to get it. A number of survivors want me to say that they are annoyed that the Minister continually uses the word "distress" to describe the impact of this. It is a lot more than distress; it is psychological damage. I really fear that he does not get the psychological harm that is done to people as a result of this. They are not damsels in distress. It is a lot more than that. The Minister is bringing in a law on the basis of minimising the damage and he really does not understand it. I also want to make an extremely important point. The Minister is bringing in a mandatory disclosure hearing and taking any agency away from the victim and passing total agency over to a judge. I know the Minister has great faith in judges, but I do not think the general population has the same absolute faith that he has. Let us look at Canada where this system is in place. The Minister's hope and claim is that when we have these hearings and a judge will decide, there will hardly ever be any demand for these notes. It is not true. They have this system in Canada. They introduced it in 2020. I will give the House the figures for Canada, where the system is more robust. I have not seen the wording of what the Minister is proposing. What is relevant? How is a judge going to decide? Has the Minister any more information? He says he is going to back with some on Committee Stage. He should not have come back with such flimsy stuff a year after this was raised. A defence can ask for counselling records and it automatically goes to a hearing. That is what happens in Canada. Rather than decreasing submissions from defences for records, they have actually increased in Canada. From 2015 to 2019, the years before the implementation of the system in 2020, some 19% of victims had their records asked for. From 2020 to 2024, some 29% of victims had their counselling records accessed. It did nothing to decrease the demand from defences for notes. There is no proof that what the Government is proposing to bring in will work. I want to give the House more figures from Canada, where there is an ombudsperson for victims. They have done huge research into the role of the judicial process on this counselling notes issue. They surveyed 1,000 victims from 2024 to 2025. I will briefly give the House some idea of the massive psychological damage that something like this counselling notes issue can cause. Some 13% chose not to report to the police because they wanted to take part in counselling. Some 12% of the 1,000 people they interviewed were advised not to speak to a therapist because their private records could be subpoenaed. Some 20% wanted to speak with a counsellor but felt like they could not because their private records would be subpoenaed. The suicide ideation rate was off the charts. Some 13% had thoughts of suicide, particularly in relation to their therapy notes and other things like that, but particularly their therapy notes being accessed. This is a significant issue for people. I really do not think the Minister is taking it on board. I want to mention one other case. Paula Doyle has spoken about this in public and at the committee. She asked me to particularly mention that after the horrific rape she suffered, she could not touch or hug her children. She felt that she was contaminated and that her body was defiled. She did not want it to make contact with any other innocent person. That is horrific and is the outcome of being sexually assaulted. That was used against her in court because she had said it in therapy. She was asked: "What kind of mother are you if you cannot touch your own children?". Things like the morning-after pill, which she mentioned in therapy, were also brought up. The Minister has never told anyone where it has been shown that there is any evidential value in these notes. Why do we need this great system? It is purely to find a nugget that can be used to undermine a person's character and to assassinate the character of the victim who is the complainant. That is all it is. I say it is misogynistic because it is mainly women, but I was approached by a man who thanked me for raising concerns about the Bill because his notes had been accessed. This can happen to men. It can happen to child victims of sexual abuse as well. I wanted to stress that because I wonder about what he has come back to the House with. The easiest thing to do was to revert back and take away the waiver. It is not enough. I want to quickly make a few points on what the Minister could do. There are a couple of ways around this. The Minister could, for example, make these counselling notes privileged. We have loads of privilege in our society and our legal system. I will give a couple of examples. We have privilege for the legal profession, which means there is privilege between lawyers and their clients. We have sacerdotal privilege, which means priests are not compelled to go in front of a trial and outline what was said to them in the confessional. There is Cabinet confidentiality. Journalists’ sources are confidential. I realise that a person might not have full privilege, but there is full or partial privilege in all of these cases. There is also parliamentary privilege. I can stand up today and say all sorts of things but I cannot be called to court over them. There is also spousal privilege. I am sure the Minister has a huge legal brain, so he can find a way to address this. He just has not been bothered enough. I do not believe it is bothering him as much as it should be. There is a way to address this within the bounds of our Constitution. The Oireachtas can weigh up the conflict of rights. The Minister mentioned only the right to privacy, but people have other rights. He is restricting his consideration to the right to privacy. Is he telling me that the Irish Constitution states people can be degraded routinely or that victims of crime should be degraded daily in our courts? There are other rights, including rights to access justice, healing, therapy and healthcare. There are all sorts of things. There are competing rights and the Oireachtas could have drafted a law that would have made it very clear where the balance should lie. I will not have time to go into everything. We know the figures for gender-based violence are off the charts. Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has the highest number of calls. The Garda has also had a high number. Therefore, this is an important issue. I was going to talk to the Minister about other survivors and what they have said but I believe I have made the point about the damage done. I want to mention therapy briefly, because therapists are disgusted with this legislation as well. Dr. Niamh Ní Dhomhnaill, who is a survivor of rape and a chartered clinical psychologist, has campaigned widely in the past couple of years to get her professional body to come out against the practice of using counselling notes. She has stated that therapy can offer a space to make sense of the pain, confusion and stuckness that trauma creates in us, and also that it is supposed to be a place to explore in safety and without fear of repercussions. This is not possible if you know something you say could potentially be used against you. The organisations that have said this law should not proceed as it currently stands are Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, the National Women’s Council of Ireland, the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the Psychological Society of Ireland, the Irish Council for Psychotherapy, Therapists Against Harm, Beyond Surviving, Éist, the Oireachtas justice committee, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapists. I am sure there are many more. There has been a groundswell of opinion on the practice. People are disgusted when they hear this is happening. I direct the Minister again to the reasons sexual crime is not reported. There is fear of not being believed and there is shame. The lack of faith in the justice system is a major reason. The Minister could restore some faith by finding a way to put records out of reach. I am disappointed that the Minister has not come back with something more than he has come back with. People are not taking cases for many reasons. One of them is that the system is so traumatic and another is the use of counselling notes. I emphasise that therapy is not linear. You could say something one day and it could be counteracted by how you feel on another day. Judges are not experts in analysing therapy notes. Why should they be regarded as such? No offence, but many judges are not even receiving training on gender-based violence. It is not compulsory anyway. How are judges supposed to become experts in analysing counselling notes and understanding self-blame, shame and everything else that could be used against victims? The same applies to solicitors and juries. The Minister needs to go completely back to the drawing board. I want to finish by mentioning some other issues that arise from this Bill, one being that of pepper spray in prisons. We heard testimony last week indicating that 150 prisoners were lying on mattresses in shared cells. Pepper spray is being introduced into that mix. We know from scientific data that if people have weaponry, they are likely to use it. Let us set up a proper prison system where people have space and so on. Many people are in prison because of the likes of a drug addiction, in respect of which they need healthcare rather than imprisonment. It was found in a six-month pilot programme in England and Wales that one in four uses of pepper spray was inappropriate or unnecessary. This shows it will be used in the wrong places. I want to mention briefly the question of so-called "sex for rent". I agree that the proper term is "sexual exploitation" because of the housing crisis. I think I was one of the first TDs to raise this, not in the last Dáil but in the previous one. I was approached about a particular case. I welcome any law that will make things more difficult for perpetrators. I feel it would be very difficult for someone to take a case under any law because of the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants created by the Government’s failure to deal with the horrific housing crisis over the past 12 or 13 years. Unless that imbalance is corrected, it will remain difficult. I reiterate that survivors have asked for a vote to be called on this Bill. I understand this is difficult because there are many provisions in it. Some Deputies may want to vote for some elements of it and not for others. However, it is important to send a message to the Government that there is anger and annoyance over the issues that have not been addressed. Therefore, I will be calling a vote at the end of this debate. We are also calling for action at local level. I see a Fine Gael TD here now, which is great, but nobody from Fine Gael has spoken. A couple of Members from Fianna Fáil have spoken. A process of education is still needed on this issue, particularly throughout the Government ranks. People are coming in to say all sorts of things. This Bill is not the solution that people have asked for. It is not the solution that Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, which probably deals with more victims of sexual violence now than ever before, has called for. It is not the solution called for by those at the front line, including therapists or survivors, so the Minister needs to do a lot better.

Sentiment score: -0.07