an interview with the Irish Examiner<\/a>, the woman said the most difficult aspect of the justice process was being asked for access to her counselling notes.<\/p>\n\u201cI think I had been going to counselling eight or nine months at that point,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked first: \u2018How was that even allowed?\u2019 and said ‘absolutely not, no way’.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my understanding, it was so that the defence team could see them, but yet because I was technically a witness in the State\u2019s case, I was entitled to no information.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked for information and wrote to the DPP myself and asked what information was I entitled to. I just got a response that no information could be given.\u201d<\/p>\n
She described being asked for access to the notes as \u201cviolating\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCounselling was something I had chosen to do for myself, I had to go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In February, the Cabinet approved the Criminal Law and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill which will allow the use of counselling notes only where there is risk of an unfair trial. The bill has now been referred to the justice committee for scrutiny.<\/p>\n
If enacted, the decision on whether to allow the records as evidence will lie with judges after disclosure hearings to establish if the notes contain evidence relevant to the legal proceedings.<\/p>\n
The woman said when she was asked a second time for access to her notes, she was told it could work in her favour by showing the effect the harassment had on her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it was about a week or two of trying to weigh up the pros and cons and in the end I said fine, but it was purely because it would help me, and with a very heavy heart.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can only imagine what it is like for people in abuse and sexual assault situations. For a couple of sessions after that, I feel I held back a little in the sessions in case they came back to look for more.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of it in my head was that I didn\u2019t want him to know what he has done to me. Even at the point of the victim impact statement, I didn\u2019t want to cry. I didn\u2019t want to show him that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The woman\u2019s former partner Se\u00e1n Fagan, aged 39, of Dunvale Crescent, Frankfield, Douglas, was sentenced in February to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[56556,79,54,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-396263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-violence-against-women","tag-cork-news","tag-courts","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}