Mr. Brian Killoran:

I shall speak from an immigration perspective. The unwillingness or lack of clear legislation on the matter has generally focused in the past on treating the Minister's discretion as being the holy grail and that we must have the entire immigration system based on the discretion of the Minister. We would always argue that discretion is necessary within a system to take care of situations that are exceptions rather than the norm and that one cannot govern a whole immigration system based on the principle of discretion. It should be 80% rights and entitlements with clear procedures and responses that are possible to do and have been done in other jurisdictions. Overwhelmingly the tendency is now to go towards legislation even though it is painstakingly slow. Here we still seem to hold discretion as being the holy grail but it needs to be the exception rather than the rule.

We have been told by very senior civil servants in the Department of Justice and Equality that if we legislate for domestic violence, we will have to legislate for divorce and for X, Y and Z. Our answer is "Yes, you do and that is it."