Ms Sinéad Gibney:

I will pick up on a few of the questions and Mr. O'Neill might want to follow with a bit more detail. Senator Pauline O'Reilly is right that it is a balance of process as well as systemic and cultural issues within these institutions. Both those issues must be addressed not just within local authorities but across public sector bodies. As regards changing legislation, if the legislation is not working it should be looked at, reviewed and changed or new legislation should be introduced. However, the focus for us today is on these equality reviews. As Mr. O'Neill outlined, changes can be made within the existing system that will affect people's lives and that is what we would like to see happen from these equality reviews. We should bring it through as far as we can with this particular exercise and build on that, and on all the other fronts we mentioned, in how we engage on this issue. That relates to Deputy Stanton's question as well.

On the matter of interviewing councillors, this process is an ideal opportunity for councillors to engage with us if they wish to, and some of them have done that through social media and responded to some of our outreach on this issue. We are open for business in terms of engaging with people and helping them to understand. Between the recommendations of the expert review group and the local level recommendations we are giving, it has never been easier for leaders within these organisations, both councillors and staff, to effect change. We will be happy to do that. We also engage in broader work on attitudes and racism, which needs to be done. As I mentioned, we ran a campaign this year called Because we’re all human. Means we’re all equal. We will continue to run that campaign and engage with the general public on racism and attitudes towards race. This is ongoing work that we will continue to do. If the committee has any suggestions I ask it to please get in touch and let us know if there are ways in which it thinks we could be best using our resources.