Amber Women’s Refuge, Carlow and Kilkenny’s Domestic Abuse Organisation for women and children published their Annual Report 2025 today.
The findings cite that 635 women in Carlow and Kilkenny contacted Amber for support and information, a 16% increase on the previous year.
The report also outlines that the number of women supported by the organisation last year who sought protection orders in courts in our locality increased by almost a third on 2024.
Naoimh Murphy, Communications and Training Officer at Amber attributed the increase to a better understanding of the different types of abuse. She added that its a positive step that more women are now contacting the organisation.
Mrs Murphy believes however, that the focus needs to shift from crisis support to prevention and education when it comes to domestic abuse in Ireland.
“As a society, we need to be focusing more on the prevention and education. At the moment the commissioning model in the domestic abuse sector is all crisis-driven”.
“We need to be looking at getting in earlier so that these toxic attitudes, these senses of entitlement, these patterns of behaviour that allow abusers to do what they do… that they are as much as possible stopped at the root”.
