Ireland Steps In: How Safe Ireland Is Building a Domestic Abuse–Informed System

Systems ChangeImplementation
Written By Jessica Sisler

By Claire Kearney, Education and Training Manager, Safe Ireland & Nic Douglas, European Regional Manager, Safe & Together Institute

Across the UK and Europe, the Safe & Together Model has been steadily reshaping how systems respond to domestic abuse, moving the focus from survivor choices to those of the perpetrator and how these choices harm children and family functioning. Practitioners, partnerships, and systems are finding a common foundation—one built on perpetrator accountability, survivor partnership, and child-centred practice.

Ireland is now stepping firmly into that movement, and the implications are significant.

Meaningful Investments and Partnerships

Through The Wheel’s Training Links Programme, part-funded by the National Training Fund through the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Safe Ireland—Ireland’s national social change agency dedicated to ending domestic violence—recently began rolling out Safe & Together Model training project across its membership of 38 specialist frontline domestic violence services. The project has been delivered in three phases: Core Training for frontline staff, followed by Trainer Certification for a smaller cohort, and a cascading model of ongoing community-based training.

Three staff members have now completed Trainer Certification—the first in the Republic of Ireland—building the internal capacity to deliver the Model sustainably across services. To date, the project has included both in-person and online Core Training and community Overview Training days, with further sessions scheduled to expand reach.

Overall, the project aims to drive long-term culture and practice change across services and sectors, improving safety, outcomes, and coordinated responses for families experiencing domestic violence. To ensure sustainability beyond the funding period, Safe Ireland established a decentralised delivery model, where its members host Overview Training days while Safe Ireland provides trained facilitators and coordination support.

In addition, Safe Ireland has secured €97,062 from the Department of Justice’s Community Safety Fund to roll out Safe & Together in County Mayo in partnership with An Garda Síochána. The funding is supporting implementation on the ground in Mayo and, crucially, enabling additional staff from Safe Ireland and partner organisations to train as Safe & Together Certified Trainers. In addition to the three practitioners who are already Certified Trainers, eight more are coming this year to create the infrastructure to take the Model across Ireland.

This matters for three main reasons:

  • First, it places domestic abuse–informed practice within a community safety framework that explicitly recognises perpetrator behaviour as the driver of harm, not survivor “vulnerability,” not “relationship conflict,” and not “failure to protect.”

  • Second, the partnership with An Garda Síochána is not incidental. Across the UK and Europe, the projects that shift outcomes for survivors and children are the ones where policing, child protection, specialist services, and the courts share a common framework. Mayo offers a chance to build that shared framework from the ground up.

  • Third, the Certified Trainer model means this is not a one-off training event. It is sustained capacity, with Irish practitioners who are equipped to embed the Model across Irish systems in Irish contexts and who are accountable to Irish survivors.

A Multi-Agency Approach by Design

What distinguishes Safe Ireland’s approach is a clear-eyed recognition that domestic abuse is never the business of any single agency. Survivors and their children encounter multiple systems, often simultaneously, and perpetrators exploit the gaps between those systems with practised skill. A child protection response that does not align with the policing response, that does not align with the family court response, that does not align with the health or housing response leaves precisely the kind of disjointed picture in which abusive behaviour can continue unchecked.

Safe Ireland is building both projects as a multi-agency endeavour from the outset. An Garda Síochána is the named partner in the Mayo project, but the ambition extends across the wider professional landscape: child protection, family support, health services, mental health and substance use services, housing, education, and the specialist domestic abuse sector itself. The Safe & Together Model gives each of those agencies a shared way of seeing a case—the same questions, the same focus on perpetrator behaviour, and the same commitment to partnering with the protective parent and keeping children’s lived experience central.

This is what makes the Model travel. It does not ask each profession to abandon its own expertise; it gives them a common framework within which their expertise can finally add up to more than the sum of its parts. 

Why Now and Why Ireland

Feedback from a training needs analysis conducted with the Safe Ireland membership revealed consistent and significant gaps in practice. Professionals across statutory and community services lacked understanding of domestic abuse—particularly coercive control—and routinely held non-offending parents, most often mothers, responsible for the perpetrator’s abuse. Practice too often focused on adult survivors’ actions rather than identifying and documenting perpetrators’ patterns of behaviour, and the experiences of children were rarely connected to those patterns.

These gaps have real consequences. Survivors frequently fear child removal and judgment from professionals, creating barriers to disclosure and driving disengagement from the support they need. When perpetrators are not held accountable, abusive behaviour goes unaddressed, and the response to families becomes fragmented and inconsistent.

The timing in Ireland is right. There is a strong national focus on improving responses to domestic violence with the establishment of CUAN, Ireland’s statutory agency within the Department of Justice. Safe Ireland wants to strengthen consistency, clarity, and confidence across all professionals in varying sectors charged with responding to families living with abuse. Evidence shows that when professionals across sectors are equipped with the same language and shared tools, cross-system collaboration improves, fragmentation decreases, and the system’s capacity to hold perpetrators accountable—and partner meaningfully with survivors—increases substantially.

Within Safe Ireland’s network and beyond, there is both the readiness and appetite for a framework that can unify practice, strengthen professional confidence, and support a more coordinated, system-wide response.

Ambition Beyond the Pilot

The Safe Ireland projects are just a starting point, not an endpoint. Claire Kearney, who is leading the work, made it clear that the ambition runs further: “Safe Ireland wants to see the Model embedded across higher education institutes in social work, social care, nursing, law—any colleges or universities that have programmes linked to frontline practice. We want to create a workforce that has new graduates already trained in the Safe & Together Model, stepping out into their professional work responding to families. It is a systems intervention model, and the training and implementation of it within our systems can also strengthen assessment and decision-making at entry points within child protection processes, judicial training, guardian ad litem practice, and the family court system. Safe Ireland’s ambition is to fold the Model into existing good practice, so it becomes embedded as the standard domestic abuse–informed lens that is used in everyday practice across services in Ireland. We aim to extend our multi-agency reach across key sectors, including health, mental health, policing, housing, education, and financial services—prioritising partners who demonstrate readiness through leadership buy-in, openness to reflective practice, and a commitment to adopting a shared language and framework to improve coordinated responses to domestic violence.”

Joining a Movement

Ireland’s rollout does not happen in isolation. It joins a network of jurisdictions where the Model is already producing evidence of change, from local authorities in England and programmes in Scotland to Cafcass Cymru’s work in Welsh family courts and multi-agency partnerships across continental Europe. The Safe & Together Institute is committed to supporting Irish colleagues with the learning, tools, and peer connections that come with being part of that wider community of practice.

For survivors and children in Ireland, what this ultimately means is a system that is better equipped to see what is happening to them, to hold perpetrators accountable for the choices they make, and to partner with protective parents rather than blame them. That is the work. This is where Ireland’s chapter of it begins.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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Supporting Children’s Recovery: How Trauma-Informed Practice Complements Safe & Together