Ms Sinéad Gibney:

Yes, I will come in and Mr. Harris will follow. I want to pick up on two particular points from the Senator: first, the questions regarding local government and, second, the points around Covid. I urge the Department to consider in its implementation plan for the UNCRPD the foregrounding of the public sector equality and human rights duty of 2014. This has been on the Statute Book for seven years. If the local authorities were in compliance with their public sector equality and human rights duty, there would be a natural flow into their compliance with the UNCRPD. Therefore, it is important to remember that this duty is a positive statutory obligation on public sector bodies to have regard for equality and human rights in the work they do, and that they assess, address and report on their activities within it. If we can continue to foreground that, it will help with that implementation plan for the Department. I just wanted to point that out. Obviously, this applies to local authorities.

I want to pick up on a few points on Covid, in particular, as I know this is relevant to the committee today. Equal rights for disabled people have to be central to our recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. Ireland is set to receive €915 million in grants from the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the EU has advised that it needs to be spread across gender equality and equal opportunities for all, and this has to include disability considerations. Covid-19 has exposed a lot of vulnerabilities in the architecture of rights for people with disabilities.

Many of us will have already been familiar with those vulnerabilities, but I believe it has exposed them to a much broader audience. It is important for the committee to press Government to progress the range of legislation that we have mentioned today on disability rights and to give full effect to the UNCRPD. We have continued to engage in various forums throughout the pandemic to advise on the issues that are particularly affecting people with disabilities as they have arisen.

To touch on a few of them, the participation of people with disabilities and disabled persons' organisations in the Covid response has been lacking. Of course, we have had particular concerns around the situation of persons in residential settings, including nursing homes. There have also been challenges for people living in congregated settings, whether they are people with disabilities, older people or indeed people living in prisons and mental health detention facilities.

I would also like to emphasise the lack of publicly available real-time disaggregated data. That is problematic for us as a national human rights and equality institution in respect of being able to monitor how the issues and challenges that we are facing as a society and also the response from the State are affecting individual groups and, particularly, people with disabilities. The disruption of services has been really problematic and has led to stagnation and regression for individuals. There have also been problems with accessibility of information, awareness of disability and inadequate positive representation of persons with disabilities. Those are some of the key issues that we wish to highlight.

I would also assert that there is an opportunity for us, as a country, to emerge from this pandemic with a structure and an architecture that better cares for everybody in our society. I urge the committee to emphasise that going forward.

I will hand over to Mr. Harris, who might raise some points on Covid and specifically on employment.