Ms Sinéad Gibney:

I will build on some of the comments that have been made. Dr. Hartney has covered the legislative piece.

In response to housing, those measures are welcome but it is the same response I would have as to the employment piece earlier. Such a systemic change needs to happen that I do not think we need to focus on one piece. Instead, we need to think about accommodation needs. There are many different issues around housing. One example is that housing for older adults with intellectual disabilities is simply not facilitated. People are passed from pillar to post between local authorities and the services they work with. Ultimately, there seems to be a State mentality that older parents will care for their children with disabilities until those parents die and, if they are lucky, those people will be facilitated by the State after that. That is shocking and probably affects hundreds and thousands of families in the country. It is a question of going back to the UNCRPD and looking at it at a more systemic and wholesome level.

I will be happy to follow up on Deputy Gould's question on local authorities but I do not have a best-in-class example that comes to mind immediately. I will follow up on that, however. I would encourage the committee and people in local authorities to consider using the public sector equality and human rights duty to push for change in local authorities and for accessibility in their local environs. All local authorities have a duty to consider the human rights and equality considerations of all of their functions, of their service provision and of their employment practices. That has been on the books since 2014. As a commission, we are now moving from the education and encouragement phase that we have been in towards more enforcement and compliance measures.

Local authorities are definitely a significant part of that so I would encourage the committee to promote that.