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Karen Leach believes more needs to be done to protect children from abuse in Ireland

The Saturday Panel on Off the Ball dealt with child protection in sport and the supports availabl...



Karen Leach believes more need...
Videos

Karen Leach believes more needs to be done to protect children from abuse in Ireland

The Saturday Panel on Off the Ball dealt with child protection in sport and the supports available to families and children if they have something to report. 

The discussion opened with a powerful interview from abuse victim Karen Leach, who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her swim coach, Derry O'Rourke. He was later sentenced to seven years in prison after Karen and five others whom he had abused came forward. 

While Leach is happy with the progress made in child protection procedures and policies in Ireland - she believes a lot more can be done. 

"It's great and things have changed and things have changed since my time and there's great policies, procedures, apps, there's training - there's everything in place. But, for me, it's still not enough," she told Nathan Murphy.  

"I think there's too much focus on the policies and the procedures and the leaflets and the folders and you go into any children's officer, like Túsla, and I'm sure they're lovely offices and they're on the shelves and my concern is 'are they there collecting dust?'

"Because, if somebody wants to go out and abuse a child, they're not going to read these policies, they don't care - they have no respect for them. 

"My other thing is that with some of these policies, they're way too long, there's too many pages in them - people aren't going to read them. They might get to page three,four, maybe ten - they don't read the whole lot. 

"So, while they're in place, it's fantastic but for me, it's much, much more than that. It's bringing awareness out there into the fields to grassroots, to the children, to the parents, and yes, the coaches. 

"It needs to be more - it needs to be communicated. They need to know that this can happen - that it's real. Hearing something from me - hearing something from the person who has lived through it is very different from reading it in a book. So there needs to be more communication around that. 

"I still feel there's too much power given to coaches. Some places now, they're performance coaches - performance coaches for what?

"And one of the things when I look back and say 'Derry O'Rourke, he was classed as god. He was the best in Ireland' - he wasn't, we were the best in Ireland! It was us, it was the swimmers. I and my friends were the best in Ireland. We were the swimmers as were all the other swimmers. 

"I still think there's too much control and power given to coaches. They're only coaches - they can't do anything. Children are the sports and sport is nothing without children," she added.

The full Saturday Panel Podcast is available here:

Karen Leach believes more needs to be done to protect children from abuse in Ireland

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