Government ‘has nothing to apologise for’
Minister of State Frank Fahey said women have been the backbone of Ireland’s recent economic success and they remained high on the list of priorities.
He said extra funding in the budget would be enough to address the shortfall for women’s welfare groups.
“I would accept that funding and resources for the sector has not been satisfactory and for a few years funding support groups and the rape crisis centres were operating on a shoestring.
“But this has been addressed in the budget and from the letters and notes I have got from groups I would say they are now very happy with the amount of money being made available.”
The minister referred to additional resources freed up to raise awareness of violence against women. Speeches he has made since taking responsibility for the equality portfolio have always had a strong emphasis on raising awareness. This is in keeping with Government policy since 2000.
However, welfare groups argue that funding without a coherent strategy will not bring about change. They feel raising awareness without raising funding can lift the expectations for victims when the structures cannot react.
There is a feeling that the Government is avoiding the issues with high-profile seasonal advertising campaigns.
Mr Fahey did not agree with this.
“To be effective you need to empower people to come forward and the next most important thing is to empower the NGOs and that requires awareness raising.
“I think by continuing to raise awareness we can do that successfully and also by intervening early we can make perpetrators understand their behaviour is not acceptable.”
Although a funding cap has hindered victim support groups since 2002 they have been yearning for a coherent policy to emerge through the National Women’s Strategy or the five-year plan for the National Steering Committee on Violence Against Women. Neither document has been published despite promises.
The junior justice minister said both would be published before the General Election.
He did not accept the Government was dragging its heels when it was put to him that in the time it had taken to research these documents two national wage agreements, a new National Development Plan and an ambitious infrastructure schedule have emerged.
“We published an initial draft of the women’s strategy in 2005 and we had a lot of individual contributions and there was a lot of restructuring with various parties.
“We are planning to publish the National Women’s Strategy in April and the five-year strategic plan for the steering committee in March.”
The National Women’s Council of Ireland is concerned the NWS will only restate what is already in place and will not set proper targets.
Mr Fahey conceded not everybody would be happy with the strategy.
“There are some groups who want us to achieve targets that are just not possible in a 10-year time frame.”
Welfare groups have said Mr Fahey has been approachable but they feel the same cannot be said for the main decision makers at Cabinet level.
There are particular problems with the failure of departments to send senior civil servants to steering committee meetings. Nowadays, most of the five relevant departments send lower grades of civil servant, if they send anybody at all, to four meetings throughout the year.
The Department of Justice chairs the committee and a statement from it said it did not expect departments to attend every meeting.
Mr Fahey said he was happy with the commitment of the other departments but it remained their responsibility to decide who attended meetings.
The minister said he had recently completed a full review on how much each department was spending in the area of violence against women.
The department said the result of the review would not be released and the process of putting a cost on the sector had proved difficult.
