More than 1.25 million people do not have a domestic violence refuge within a 30-minute drive of their home, according to a Tusla report, meaning families would face being uprooted from their communities should they need to flee.
The long-awaited review of the provision of accommodation for victims of domestic violence states that more than 50 per cent of people living in 11 local authority areas are more than 30 minutes from a refuge, with women and children in Cork county, Galway county, Tipperary and Donegal worst affected.
The report calls for the immediate provision of a “minimum” of 56 new refuge places “to meet the lowest threshold of minimum provision”. This would require seven eight-unit refuges at a cost of €20 million, with running costs of about €5.6 million a year.
The report says the number of available spaces needs to more than treble – from 141 to 476 – to meet international obligations. The Istanbul Convention, ratified by Ireland in March 2019, commits signatories to take all steps to combat sexual and gender-based violence and says there should be one refuge space per 10,000 of population.
Shortage
Due to a shortage of places, almost 3,000 enquiries from women seeking space in domestic-violence shelters could not be accommodated in 2019.
Domestic abuse has escalated since then, the report warns, and the housing crisis is exacerbating the dearth of refuge spaces, with some families unable to leave because they cannot get housing.
Tusla is the main funder of domestic violence and abuse services, and rape and crisis services, supporting more than 40 in the community and voluntary sector.
Data from 2019 show 1,134 women and 2,918 children were accommodated in refuges.
“The average length of stay was 34 days, with 40 per cent of stays lasting between three and six weeks and 80 per cent of stays less than six weeks’ duration,” the report says. “Only a relatively small number (2 per cent of cases), stayed beyond six months. Nine cases stayed over one year.”
Availability
It notes that a total of 4,381 enquiries in 2019 about availability of a refuge place “did not result in access to refuge, almost two-thirds of these because of a lack of available or suitable places”.
“This review supports the need for an inter-agency approach to the planning and delivery of accommodation for victims of domestic violence,” the report says. “It is suggested that the most effective means of achieving this is the development of a 10-year inter-departmental commissioning plan.”
This would include development of an inter-departmental governance structure “to oversee the implementation of the commissioning plan to provide safe domestic violence accommodation nationally,” it says.
