Ms Fiona O'Donovan:

On the point of international best practice, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is all about linking in with the lived experience of people with disabilities. There are avenues for that within this budgetary process. In our submission we flagged, for example, the advisory group that has been established. There are some great insights already evident and experts on that group. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no disability-specific representation giving insight. The benefit of that, as I hope we portrayed in last year's submission, is that it gives insight into the lived experience of something operating in practice. We would be encouraging that to be worked in systematically through direct consultation.

Disability-proofing is in its infancy around the world. There are examples of it. Much of the writings on it that I have found have built on the gender-proofing initiatives. I know this initiative is very much developing on it. The best people to give the insights on how to expand on that are people with disabilities themselves.

In terms of the budgetary evaluation of last year, we did an internal assessment of how the provisions measured up against what we would have been hoping to see and had requested. We would be happy to tidy that up for external viewing and send it on to the committee for its consideration. I hope that might be of some assistance.

On international best practice, the European Union has also ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities meaning the EU, as a legal entity, has legal responsibilities just as Ireland has from our ratifying. That is relevant because the EU has already been through the assessment review by the United Nations committee and that committee has made recommendations. One of the recommendations specifically relates to how funding is allocated, particularly relating to what the EU calls institutionalisation and what we call congregation. The committee also recommended that the EU provide criteria relating to where it will give funding so that it will only give funding to initiatives that are compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It should have oversight throughout that process and review whether funding is being used in line with the application procedure and if not if there are ramifications. It went so far as to recommend that funding might have to be cut off where it is not being used.

It is not exactly equality budget proofing, therefore, but there are examples of where it is being threaded throughout or having to be looked over and where oversight is being practised in terms of implementation. I would be happy to send on to the committee a bit of documentation about that.