Ms Geraldine McGahey:

We have called on the Executive to promote participation in public life, especially by women and disabled people as well as minority and ethnic groups. We published recommendations and research on this whole topic. We stressed to government, both the UK Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, the need to hear the voices of the equality groups in Brexit policymaking. We have some concerns about the potential for further divergence between North and South on a range of equality rights. For example, Northern Ireland does not have a single equality Act for a region that was quite advanced in equality protections, and we now find ourselves slipping behind the rest of Great Britain and Ireland. There is real concern that divergence could widen further. Some work needs to be done on that.

An area of research we committed to undertake in the very near future is the impact of Brexit on the various equality groups across the nine categories, and looking to take the views of those affected groups into account so that proper meaningful recommendations and policy positions can be adopted leading from that.