There are now new policies in place to shield victims and stop stalking, reports RTE.
The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, introduced the new rules, which would enable a victim of stalking to apply for a civil injunction in District Court to stop the stalker activity.
The amount of proof necessary to get a criminal conviction is not necessary under the new system of civil orders, which permits early involvement.
Regardless of their relationship to the stalker, all victims of stalking activity will now be covered by the provisions, which expand the safeguards already offered to some victims, reports RTE.
Previously, the law only applied when the offender was a partner, either living or deceased.
In addition, the new rules provide the court to issue an interim order while the application is ongoing, if the court determines that doing so is appropriate and essential for the applicant’s safety and welfare.
These temporary orders are intended to shield victims from continued criminal activity while they wait for the outcome of their application.
In her words, “an important step forward in our work to tackle all forms of sexual and gender-based violence, regardless of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator” is the provision of civil orders to stop stalking, reports RTE.
The laws that went into effect today come after ones that were passed in November 2023 and that strengthened the penalties for domestic abuse as well as established a new, stand-alone crime of stalking.
The maximum punishment for stalking as a stand-alone crime is 10 years.
Women’s Aid CEO Sarah Benson praised the new regulations, stating that obtaining a safety order can “avoid an escalation of dangerous stalking.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, she said that people may have assumed that if someone were being stalked and they could apply for a restraining order, “but actually, until today, anyone in that terrifying situation would first have had to pursue criminal proceedings against somebody,” reports RTE.
“And we all know that a criminal process can take years sometimes, and it was only at the conclusion of a criminal trial that somebody who was a victim of stalking could then have a restraining order against the perpetrator of the abuse,” reports RTE.
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