I thank the committee for the invitation to speak to it this afternoon. I am the CEO of West Cork Women Against Violence. We provide a support service to women and children experiencing domestic violence in west Cork. Our work extends from Macroom to the west and Bandon to the east across three peninsulas - Mizen, Sheepshead and Beara - and seven inhabited islands. This rural geography and the remoteness of large parts of the region we service will figure significantly in my comments to the committee today.
This Bill is a major step forward as it inherently recognises the extensive challenges placed on those experiencing domestic violence and so provides a response to alleviate some of those challenges with sympathetic, pragmatic employment supports and protections that ensure victims are not further penalised or discriminated against because of their need for those supports.
When a woman is forced to take action to save herself and her children from domestic abuse, she has to navigate soul-sapping channels of bureaucracy, embark on labyrinthine journeys to access legal protections and spend achingly frustrating hours arranging and attending appointments with multiples of or sometimes every one of the following - doctor, Garda, solicitor, court clerk, social worker, counsellor, domestic violence support worker, housing officer and landlords - and has to synchronise all of those in her out-of-work hours and within the school pick-up schedule. As mammoth a task as that is, let us consider the virtual odyssey she has to undertake to get to the offices of those professional agencies and institutions if she lives in an area like west Cork. For our purposes, let us make it easy. Today, our client is from Bantry and so can easily access our domestic violence support service in the town where she seeks help in obtaining a protection order. This will require a statement from her in her own words as to the events that led her to need protection. We will assist her to write her statement. This process can take upwards of three hours and more usually most of the day because she is recounting traumatic events, is being retriggered and becoming distressed and needs rest breaks.
Her paperwork is then submitted to the court clerk’s office to be scheduled for a hearing at the next immediate sitting. However, the next sitting may be in Clonakilty which is 51 km away, a 50 minute drive from Bantry, or it could be in Bandon which is a 120 km round trip.
Let us make it more straightforward today because we do not have time to wait for a rural bus service. We will give our client her own means of transport, which is just as well because there is no public transport directly to Clonakilty from Bantry. However, if she had to be in Bandon for court, there is a bus from Bantry at 8.30 a.m. that will get her to Bandon for 10.20 a.m., in time for court commencement. Then she has to hope that her case will be heard and a protection order granted in time to catch the 4.40 p.m. bus back to Bantry, arriving at 5.50 p.m. Should it be a busy court schedule, she may leave on the last bus which arrives in Bantry at 8.15 p.m. Either way, it will have taken her the best part of 12 hours to attend court and get her protection order. The cost is approximately €20, which is for the bus fare and excludes eating, drinking and childcare costs.
For today’s purposes our client has a car and she hopes that the waiting time in court, where a myriad of other cases are to be heard from drug offences to licensing applications, is not so lengthy. She is praying that she will be squeezed into the judge’s schedule before the kids get out of school and that she has enough money to cover the petrol for her 100 km trip. On this occasion, she gets her temporary protection order and must return in a week’s time to get her safety order. On that date the court is sitting in Macroom, a 108 km round trip with no direct bus service available. She will worry about that next week. For now, the next most important step is to organise an appointment with the doctor to get help with sleeping and to request a referral for her oldest to the HSE child psychologist. Her boy is still wetting the bed at 11 years of age and hides in the hot press when he hears his father shouting.
As the family home is on her partner’s family farm, she has been advised to put her name on the council housing list as soon as she can. To do so she will require, on average, 12 different documents and as many as 17, particularly if she is a non-Irish resident. Some of the documents she may need will require a fee to obtain and some may need to be translated, for yet another hefty fee. She will also have to present herself to the council office to be assessed should she become homeless due to domestic violence. All this will require trips, phone calls and requests to various institutions and agencies to provide proof that she has no other means of accommodation and is not intent on subverting council services which are located in only one office in west Cork, in Clonakilty. It is a good job she does not live in Castletownbere or it would be a 200 km round trip to the housing office, with no direct bus service; worse still, she could be travelling from one of the islands.
Regretfully, I have seen too many women forced to give up work because of the rigorous, ongoing demands of organising safety and well-being for themselves and their children, resulting in work becoming incompatible with survival. The freedom to work outside the home may have been one of the only freedoms a woman could exercise in a coercively controlled relationship and ironically, she may often have to sacrifice that employment to navigate her route to protection. The right to paid leave and to continue in employment means a victim of domestic violence can put petrol in the car, pay bus fares, fees, pay for doctor’s appointments and, crucially, have some level of economic independence and security.
I would respectfully suggest that it be made clear that the ten days domestic violence leave can be taken over a staggered period as waiting times, appointment availability and court sittings do not, unfortunately, occur on convenient, consecutive days. Outside of court days, most other appointments and commitments can be met by taking a few hours leave on the required dates. In that context, consideration should be given to domestic violence leave that is calculated in hours.
There is a clear, victim-centred focus to this Bill which I welcome, but it also has benefits for employers, permitting them to keep experienced staff who might otherwise have to leave their employ. It also reduces the employee’s stress and loss of focus on the job which can often occur over an extended period where a victim has very little access to paid leave to attend to the necessary processes she needs to engage in. In combining benefits for both employee and employer, consideration of a period of flexible working for those employees who are engaged in efforts to improve their safety has proven very useful in other jurisdictions. Flexible working has helped to overcome so many economic and social challenges, as we have found recently. In this situation too, an option of flexible working would allow some women to work while also managing the new reality of their changed circumstances and environment which cannot be overcome within a specified, ring-fenced number of days or hours.
I thank the committee members for listening and especially for their efforts to support employees who are victims of domestic violence and coercive control.
