'He took my body without my consent. Then the justice system handed him my mind'. Paula Doyle is one of many rape survivors who want the law on using counselling notes in court to be changed

Published: 22:04, 16 June 2026 | Updated: 22:04, 16 June 2026 The brown envelope arrived at Paula Doyle’s door, carried by a member of An Garda Síochána. Inside was a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions. Her counselling notes — four and a half years of them, every session, every hour, everything she had ever said in the room she had gone to in order to survive — were being requested by the defence team of the man who had raped her. Paula Doyle had no idea this was possible. Not once in the three and a half years she had been going to therapy had anyone mentioned that this was the legal reality in Ireland. She had spoken about her nightmares and flashbacks, about carrying a knife because the fear never left her, about her suicide attempts. She had told her counsellor about the day she went to her doctor and asked for a blood transfusion — wanting all of her blood taken out and replaced — so that she might feel clean enough to hold her own children. Aidan Kestell, the man who had raped her, got to read all of it. ‘He might as well have been sitting on an empty chair in my counselling room the entire time,’ says Paula, 52, from Blanchardstown in Co Dublin. ‘He took my body that night without my consent. And now the justice system handed him my mind — and didn’t need my consent for that either.’ It is worth noting how Paula came to be walking home with Aidan Kestell that September night in 2019. For more than three years, she had been receiving graphic and threatening messages from an unknown number — sometimes more than 50 a day. She and her partner had reported them to Gardaí. The messages kept coming. When the party ended and it was time to walk home, she accepted Kestell’s offer to accompany her. She thought she would be safer with a man who was her friend’s husband whom she’d known for years. Kestell raped her in a park three streets from her home, leaving her lifeless in the bushes. Gardaí later traced the anonymous messages and discovered they were from Kestell too. He was convicted of rape in February 2024 and sentenced to eight years with six months suspended. Paula had waited almost five years for that verdict. What happened in the courtroom when her therapy notes were deployed is something she has never come to terms with. Kestell’s barrister asked her, in front of a jury, what kind of mother she thought she was. She said she felt she was a good mother. He read directly from her most fragile moments — that she had written about being unable to hug her children. Then he turned to the jury. ‘She says she is a good mother,’ he said, ‘but she cannot hug her children.’ Paula tried to explain but she was not permitted to finish her answer. What she had written in the protected space of therapy — a documented response to devastating trauma — had been fashioned into, as she describes it, a character attack. ‘That is not evidence,’ she says. ‘That is my trauma. And they made it into a weapon.’ Paula sat in that courtroom without her own legal representation. In Ireland, rape victims are witnesses for the State. The DPP takes the case; the victim is simply another witness, afforded no more formal advocacy than a neighbour describing what they heard. ‘You have nobody there to say “Stop, enough”,’ she says. ‘The person that has done this to you is so close, and the defence are going to use your very private notes as a weapon to beat you down on the stand, and there is nobody to object. Nobody. I had to answer every single question. He was sitting there smirking, knowing how vile it was.’ Paula’s experience is not an anomaly. It is a pattern — one that Rape Crisis Ireland, which supports thousands of survivors every year, has been documenting with growing alarm. ‘The fear that therapeutic conversations may be weaponised in court creates a very real chilling effect,’ said Dr Clíona Saidléar, the organisation’s Executive Director, this week. ‘On survivors’ willingness to access support, how they engage with services, and on their decision to pursue justice at all.’ It was precisely to address that chilling effect that campaigners turned to the Dáil. On Wednesday night, they were told the system could not go further. The Dáil passed the remaining stages of the Criminal Law, Civil Law and Defence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026 — but not in the form survivors had fought for. The debate had been guillotined into a compressed evening sitting, with the Government’s own amendments surviving intact and stronger opposition amendments defeated. People Before Profit TD Ruth Coppinger’s proposals for a full ban or highest-level protections were voted down. The practice is restricted, not abolished. For the women who had spent years fighting for a full ban, that distinction is everything. What passed was Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan’s more  limited package: a mandatory judicial hearing in all cases, removing the provision that had allowed survivors to waive their right to such a hearing; a presumption of non-disclosure; and a requirement that a judge find a real risk of an unfair trial before any records are released. Minister O’Callaghan cited Attorney General advice that a blanket prohibition would be unconstitutional, incompatible with an accused person’s right to a fair trial under Article 38 of the Constitution. He described disclosure as ‘a bedrock of a procedurally fair and just process’ and maintained that his reforms represented the maximum protection the Constitution permits. One detail, above all, campaigners said was impossible to forgive. In May, as the Bill was being debated in the Dáil, O’Callaghan attended the launch of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s annual report, posing for photographs and accepting the organisation’s hospitality. But on Wednesday he rejected its proposals — drafted to work within the very constitutional limits he himself had cited, and offering stronger protections than his own. He did not meet the group. He did not engage. He simply voted them down. Outside Leinster House that evening, survivors gathered. They stood first in silence, then the anger broke — not the heat of surprise, but the cold, steady fury of people who had expected this, and had already decided they would not stop. The practice has its roots in legislation dating back to 1992, substantially reformed in 2017. Under it, defence teams in sexual offence trials can apply for access to a complainant’s counselling records if they may contain material relevant to their case. Victims can object — but in practice, that objection has often proved meaningless. Many survivors have been told informally by Gardaí that refusing to hand over notes will delay their trial by six to nine months. The Government’s new reforms, supporters insisted, tighten conditions — but they do not end the practice. That distinction, between reform and abolition, was at the heart of Wednesday’s battle. Ruth Coppinger is unsparing. ‘Nobody has ever given me one single concrete example of a case where access to a survivor’s counselling notes was genuinely vital to a fair trial,’ she says. ‘Not one. These notes are not being sought because they contain evidence. They are sought because defence teams know that within four and a half years of private sessions, somewhere there will be a sentence that can be taken out of context — a moment of self-blame, a contradiction, something raw said in the safety of a therapy room and then weaponised. The Government has just decided that practice can continue.’ Bairbre Kelly, a psychotherapist and founder of Therapists Against Harm, frames the damage in clinical terms. ‘At least once a day in my therapy room someone says a sentence that would destroy them if it were taken out of context,’ she says. ‘Survivors often wonder whether they made it clear enough that they weren’t consenting. They feel guilty for reporting — that they have destroyed somebody’s life. Take that sentence out of the room, strip it of its therapeutic meaning, and hand it to a defence barrister, and it becomes lethal. The Government’s mandatory hearing does not stop that — because the problem is that the client knows, sitting in that room, that it might happen. The moment that knowledge enters the therapy space, the space is broken.’ Therapists have begun advising clients not to have notes taken at all. Some have stopped taking notes entirely, compromising their professional standards to protect their clients. Survivors now arrive asking what is safe to say — a question that should be unthinkable, because the answer is supposed to be everything. The therapeutic relationship, built on absolute confidentiality, is collapsing under a law that treats healing as potentially evidentiary. Roberta Wilkin is both a psychotherapist and a survivor. ‘I have personally experienced having my counselling notes dissected by detectives,’ she says. ‘Rather than feeling supported, it felt as though I was the one being investigated. It was deeply invasive and contributed to my re-traumatisation. Survivors should not have to choose between accessing mental health support and protecting their privacy. The justice system should not compound that trauma.’ Hazel Behan of Éist — Saying No to Silence highlights the question that hangs over the entire debate. People who survive violent assaults, road accidents, robberies, or bereavements seek counselling. Their notes are not routinely targeted. It is only in sexual offence trials that this has become standard practice. ‘There persists a culture of heightened credibility-testing applied to complainants that does not exist for victims of other crimes,’ she says. ‘An assumption that these women might be lying, and that somewhere in years of private sessions, the proof might be found.’ The numbers provide damning context. According to the CSO’s Sexual Violence Survey, almost three in ten Irish adults experienced sexual violence as a child. Among women, the figure is 36 per cent. Among young women aged 18 to 24, it approaches 41 per cent. Seventy per cent of perpetrators are known to their victims — family members, partners, trusted people. Yet only around five per cent of survivors report to An Garda Síochana. Of those, roughly two per cent see their case progress to the DPP. Convictions sit below one per cent. ‘Less than five per cent of abuse cases are brought to justice, and around one per cent result in convictions,’ says Michelle Ní Chléirigh, a Galway-based survivor and advocate. ‘A ban on the use of counselling notes is one measure that could help survivors feel more supported. Justice should not require survivors to choose between healing and accountability.’ Paula Doyle knows women who have made the most devastating calculation in the wake of Wednesday’s vote. Women are ringing her to say they are giving up counselling because they cannot bear the risk, choosing between their case and their mental health. ‘Victims are coming to me now and they are saying: “Paula, I am giving up counselling. Can you just help me?” You have women choosing between their mental health and their right to justice,’ Paula says. ‘That is the chilling effect the Minister’s amendments have preserved.” When Jim O’Callaghan told her personally that he knew how much distress the process had caused her, Paula told him directly: ‘Please don’t insult me any further. If I thought I had a puncture on my car, I’d be stressed about being late for work. This is not distress. This is psychological harm. There is a difference, and you know there is.’ The campaign now moves to the Seanad, and campaigners are unequivocal that the fight will not end there. Bairbre Kelly says the work will not pause for a moment. Referendum conversations that had been building throughout the campaign are now being actively pursued. Paula and another survivor are in talks with victim rights organisations in Europe. The United Nations has already called on Ireland to prohibit the practice. If the Seanad does not deliver what survivors have demanded, the call for a constitutional referendum will grow impossible to ignore. Today, Paula Doyle has one message for every survivor reading this. ‘Keep going to counselling,’ she says. ‘Please. It saved my life. I could not have got through the past years without it. I know that what happened on Wednesday makes that feel more frightening — that the room you go to heal is no longer as protected as it should be. ‘But that room still matters. Reclaim it. We are going to get this change, and until we do, you are not going to face this alone. You are entitled to heal. You are entitled to justice. You are entitled to both.’ ‘He took my body without my consent. Then the justice system handed him my mind — and didn’t need my consent for that either. That has to change. It will change.’ Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.