Dr. Eilionóir Flynn:

To take the Senator's second question first, they are still identifying the areas but once they have identified all the areas and got agreement from Government that those are the areas where action is required, those areas become the roadmap. That is my understanding of the process. We now have more detail and the discussion about reasonable accommodation was in background for a long time but now it is explicitly named as one of the issues.

In terms of the other main issues they have identified, which are sexual offences legislation and mental health law, I would be reasonably confident about what they mean with regard to what needs to be done there. Work has been done on this area, and the Senator produced a Private Members' Bill on the reform of sexual offences legislation. There is a sense that our current sexual offences legislation discriminates against certain people with disabilities and that needs to be addressed. I am speaking in regard to section 5 of the 1993 Act which makes it an offence for a person to have sexual intercourse with a person with a mental impairment. That is an issue and consent is not a defence to that offence, as we know, which is problematic.

In terms of mental health law, the UN convention requires that disability should never be a justification for a deprivation of liberty. For example, the fact that a person can be involuntarily detained and treated against one's will without one's consent under Ireland's Mental Health Act would be viewed, certainly by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as a problem with respect to article 14 of the convention. That is certainly an issue and perhaps that is what it means when it states that mental health law is in need of reform. However, those kinds of reforms take time and our experience with the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Bill has shown how long that process had taken and it is still not concluded but it is important to get it right. We would want to reform those areas of law. The question is whether the issues are of such significance that they require reform now prior to ratification, or whether they are issues that could be addressed post-ratification in the implementation of the convention. That is a judgment call and it is the Executive's role to make it but it would be valuable to inform that view with the experiences and voices of people with disabilities.