Ceisteanna ar Pholasaí nó ar Reachtaíocht - Questions on Policy or Legislation
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-22
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Ruth Coppinger (PBP), Dublin West

On 8 April, four gardaí with a search warrant barged into the home of a therapist. They shouted at her and her daughter to put down their phones, not to move and to tell them where her files were. They would not let her take a photograph of the warrant or talk to her solicitor. They said they would seize her phone and laptop. They did all this in front of her daughter, who has health conditions, and said her mother knows what she has done. The therapist had to ask them to stop shouting, such was the level of aggression.
What were they looking for? They were looking for the counselling notes of a client. They were not looking for drugs or guns but the counselling notes of a client she was trying to heal. The therapist had arranged with the client to hand over these notes when she returned from being abroad. I do not have the time to go into all of the dates and details here. The key issue is why was a therapist treated like a criminal in her home? Why has the Taoiseach and his Government allowed therapy notes of sexual assault survivors to become such an integral part of trials in the first place?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-22