Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-02
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I welcome the survivors and their supporters to the Chamber. They have been following this through the Dáil and the Seanad and will, I am sure, continue to follow this issue closely. The Labour amendment that was brought in last week and co-developed with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was a compromise but the Minister would not meet survivors and front-line response services halfway with that amendment. For that reason, I am supporting amendment No. 27 and the other amendments calling for an all-out ban. The Government is killing the only workable solution. I will not vote against stronger protections for survivors because the Government has chosen not to meet those survivors halfway.
I do not believe the provisions the Minister outlined in the Bill will do anything to protect survivors from the cruel and barbaric practice of their intimate counselling notes being weaponised against them at trial. I want to express my opposition and the emphatic opposition of the Social Democrats to the disclosure regime proposed in the Bill. It does not keep the promises or meet the commitments the Minister made in February of this year. Survivors deserve the strongest possible protection and the regime proposed does not provide it, simple as. Contrary to what the Minister has repeatedly promised to victims and survivors, the proposed regime is seriously flawed and will not prevent the practice of routine disclosure applications for counselling notes in sexual assault and abuse cases.
In Ireland, fewer than 5% of people who have experienced sexual violence ever report it to the Garda, which highlights a fundamental lack of trust in the system. It is for good reason that many survivors do not trust the system. Last week, the Central Statistics Office, CSO, published troubling new figures that show a 15% drop in the number of recorded sexual criminal incidents in the year to quarter 1 of 2026 compared with quarter 1 of 2025.
As the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, DRCC, has noted, this extremely concerning trend suggests not that sexual violence rates are decreasing - we know that is not the case, and we have plenty of reports that contacts are up in the past year, which is deeply concerning in itself - but that people are becoming reluctant to seek justice. It is there in black and white. We are creating a system whereby people do not want to come forward. They are scared of doing so because they are scared of the implications.
While front-line organisations like the DRCC report an unprecedented surge in demand for services, including therapy services, the figures show that we are seeing a potential decline in the willingness of victims to report offences. The horrifying reality is that the adversarial justice system clearly does not command the confidence of sexual assault victims and clearly discourages them from seeking justice. We have a system within which the forced disclosure of deeply personal counselling notes is one of a litany of obstacles that survivors must face. No survivor of sexual assault, rape or sexual abuse who has had the courage to seek counselling should ever have to fear that their words could be twisted and used against them should they seek to pursue justice through the courts.
We know that for many survivors of rape and sexual violence, counselling is a crucial and essential part of their recovery. It is not optional; it is where they begin to process trauma, rebuild trust and regain control of their lives. How can we stand over a system where these notes can be weaponised, as they routinely are, not in the interests of a fair trial, but solely to discredit the system? It is cruel and is symptomatic of an ingrained misogyny and a system that is stacked against sexual violence survivors every step of the way.
We have a situation whereby survivors of sexual violence are choosing not to seek counselling. They are choosing to opt out of therapy on foot of a fear that their most intimate discussions with a clinical therapist will be used against them. The DRCC has documented this. We are creating a dichotomy or a binary between getting therapy and getting justice. Getting justice is part of the therapeutic process as well. They are actually intertwined, so we cannot create a binary. For many people, if they have not gone through the justice process, if they have not held their perpetrator to account, then they cannot pursue the healing process fully. To see that person not face any retribution for the crime that was done against them, the trespass that was done against them, the physical trespass against their body, for example, can block their ability to pursue wellness in the future and develop their health again. We see that a lot in historical cases, where people go back decades later because they have not been able to move on without seeking that justice.
The idea that third-hand accounts written subjectively by a therapist, which are simply that therapist's interpretation of what the victim-survivor has recounted to them, can be used as some sort of legitimate form of evidence is mind-boggling. Counselling notes are an interpretation. They are recounting a horrendously traumatic event or events. There is a plethora of research that describes how trauma impacts memory, and in particular, body trauma, the physical trespass that has been done to someone's body. When somebody has been sexually abused or raped, body trauma has a specific impact on memory and timelines. Everyone here knows that. I am preaching to the converted. This practice of someone's therapeutic counselling notes, which are there as a tool to help them build and recover, being used as some form of evidence is nonsense. It is not a CCTV camera. It is not testimony by a witness. It is someone's personal, most intimate conversation with someone that is designed to support them. The Minister knows this. That is why it is so hard to understand why we have a situation where this legislation simply is not strong enough. The compromise that DRCC and Labour put together in the Dáil and Seanad has not been met. That was a compromise. Even with that, we are not there.
We will continue to see deeply retraumatising practices that have a chilling impact on victim-survivors and stop them from seeking justice. It is a genuine barrier to accessing justice for sexual violence survivors. It is also at odds with our obligations under the Istanbul Convention with regard to improving access to justice for survivors of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. This will not be doing that. Because we have had this really important public debate in recent years and months, driven by survivors, I might add, and because of all the hard work that survivors have done, it is also now in the ether. People will be following this. They will be following the news that comes out of this debate and how this Bill goes. It is going to have an even more chilling impact on survivors who are fearful of coming forward. They will say that the State did not improve it. The State did not listen. They fought really hard. They bared themselves publicly, which no victim should have to do. It takes really strong people to come forward and share their most powerful personal testimonies on the public record at committees. These testimonies exist for all time. We see the bravery and strength that takes, but we still will not have done anything for them. We will not have improved the system in any meaningful way.
What message does that send to women and all survivors of sexual and gender-based violence? We heard you. We saw you cry. We saw you bare your souls. We are sorry. We cannot fix the system, or we will not fix it.
We saw a textbook example of how counselling notes are routinely deployed by defence teams to undermine the credibility of survivors of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence in the recent child sex abuse trial of Jeffrey Donaldson in the North. I acknowledge that it is a different jurisdiction, but it was a public case and is relevant to how the interpretation of memory is used to discredit victims. Complainant A in that trial had her counselling notes used against her when her counsellor had indicated in her notes that her memory was really poor or bad, as is the case with body trauma. The defence team cross-examined the victim-survivor and tried to undermine her testimony on the basis of the counselling notes. That is completely barbaric. In the end, as we know, this man was convicted of heinous crimes.
I would like to quote Paula. There will be a bit of repetition here, but I think it is important. She has given me permission to use her testimony. Paula said: “The notes that were used were of no reference to the actual rape but fragments of my new broken existence”. That is what happens to memory. That is what happens to identity and to the sense of self after something like that happens. They took those fragments and they were “used by the [defence team] to discredit me on the stand as a woman, a partner and a mother.” The following is one of the most chilling parts of Paula's testimony:
The violence I experienced didn’t end with the assault. I was mentally violated against but this time by our Irish justice system. The government cannot claim to support mental health while allowing trauma symptoms to be weaponised.
Like it or dislike it. Disagree with me. Disagree with Paula. The facts are that people going through the courts will, after the enactment of this legislation, continue to have their counselling notes used as evidence of what happened to them, what horrific thing was done to their body, the violation and trespass against them and their physical personhood. We have to vote on that today. It is deeply uncomfortable for me that, after all of the public debate, we will still find that situation, and it will still go ahead. I cannot fathom how we can allow this to happen. I cannot fathom that when we talk about tackling gender-based violence and our zero-tolerance strategy, this will continue to prevent women and all victims of sexual violence from coming forward. They believe they do not have protection. They do not have the security and protection of knowing that their counselling notes will not be used. There is no guarantee.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-02/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-02