A BILL WHICH seeks to completely ban the use of a complainant’s private counselling notes in sexual offences trials will be debated in the Dáil tonight.

Ahead of the debate, therapists and victims of male violence, including campaigner Natasha O’Brien, will stage a demonstration outside Leinster House this evening at 5pm in support of the legislation.

The bill has been brought forward by TD Ruth Coppinger.

At the outset of her re-election last year, the Dublin West TD flagged that this would be one of her priorities for the Dáil term.

Coppinger and campaigners outside the Dáil in April 2025. Rollingnews.ie Rollingnews.ie

In the last Government, then-Justice Minister Helen McEntee pledged to outlaw the practice completely, while current Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan has approved plans to significantly restrict their use.

As the law currently stands, a pre-trial disclosure hearing is supposed to take place ahead of a trial to decide if an alleged victim’s counselling notes are relevant.

O’Callaghan said this provision in the law has “not operated as intended”. Last month, he received Government sign-off to amend the law to require that an automatic disclosure hearing take place in all cases and remove the provision that allows for this step to be waived.

Coppinger, however, wants the Government to go even further and ban the use of counselling notes in trials related to certain offences outright.

This move has been supported by a number of counsellors and victims of male violence.

Raising the issue in the Dáil during Leaders’ Questions this afternoon, Coppinger accused the Government of delaying her bill by a year and called this a “very cyncial measure”.

While the Government is not opposing Coppinger’s bill, it has placed a timed amendment of one year on it, meaning it can be progressed if the Government fails to progress its own legislation in that period. 

“How long are we going to have to wait? Why would it take you a year to come up with a bill in the first place? Why would you put a stop of a year on my bill?,” Coppinger asked Tánaiste Simon Harris today.

In response, Harris said: “The reason we’re delaying your bill, to use your phrase, is out of absolutely no disrespect for your bill. It’s actually out of respect for what you’re trying to do, and in recognition of the fact that we have our own bill.”

He added: “You’re not wrong on this. This is a very serious issue Leas Ceann Comhairle, that has a real chilling effect on victims and how our criminal justice system and our court system interacts with them.”

Women’s voices

Speaking at a press conference on the issue earlier this year, a number of women spoke of the trauma attached to having their private counselling notes read out in court.

Sarah Grace, a campaigner who was raped by a stranger who broke into her bedroom in 2019, described how navigating the justice system after the assault was “the most traumatising and painful ordeal” she has ever had to experience.

“Including the sexual assault itself. And I understand the weight of those words,” she said at the time.

Grace said the “most cruel blow came not at the hands of the man who violated my body”, but at the hands of the justice system.

“A system that allowed the notes of my weekly therapy session, in what I believe to be the sanctity and privacy of a therapy room, to be read by the man who caused the very devastation that I was trying to rebuild myself from,” she said.

Another woman, Paula Doyle, who was raped in a park by her friend’s husband, spoke out about how her experience of the Irish justice system in the aftermath of the assault was “inhumane”.

“At times up to the trial, I even felt I was the one on trial,” Doyle said, referring to the use of her counselling notes.

Doyle described this as a “personal intrusion” and a “second violation”.

“My private counselling notes were requested by the DPP five months before our initial trial date. I don’t have to go into it, you know what rape is. He took my body that night. He left it like a piece of rubbish in the hedges.

“How perverse is it now that he has taken time and he can read my notes, what I poured into my therapy sessions, my heart and my soul?

“I’m really still not able to put this completely into words, it just felt like such a second violation, but on a much, much deeper level.

“And it’s done to this day under the supervision of the Department of Justice…where is the justice in that?,” Doyle asked during the press conference.

The debate in the Dáil is scheduled to take place tonight at 7.20 pm.