Ms Bernadette Egan:

Okay. It is difficult to take cases in Ireland since litigation is expensive and puts many people off. There is also the stress factor, which makes it very difficult to take cases. Cases are sometimes negotiated and are not published, which means accessing who took those cases is another issue. If they do not have success in domestic law, the optional protocol is not yet ratified and that is also an issue in seeking international redress.

Norway has been at the forefront of accessibility issues since the 1960s. As I mentioned, we only really got our accessibility standards going in the mid-1990s, so we are quite a few decades behind in some ways. There were issues in the 1980s. A Norwegian architect, Kare Adler, claimed that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights also applied to disabled people and their right to access the built environment, but this was laughed at by an audience during a lecture. The Norwegians have also had issues with trying to get accessibility standards accepted and built. They also brought in the first lifespan dwelling in the 1960s and were looking at universally designed housing back then. They have been very much at the forefront and policies and systems are now built into their legislation. I will send the Senator some information about that.

Deputy Hourigan's question was about the cost of construction and the price differential between putting universal design at the forefront of development or retrofitting it later. The cost at the beginning seems a lot at the time, but it will always be better than retrofitting adaptations later. It is also important to say that it is not part of the planning process at the moment. We need to bring accessibility into the planning process at a very early stage so it is not just tacked on later when things go to tender or construction drawings are made. It should be there at the beginning of a project at planning stage, and accessibility or equality statements submitted as part of that, so it is actually thought of at that level. There will not then be issues with retrofitting and such things later, which will only have a cost-benefit analysis. The NDA is doing work on that cost-benefit analysis so there might be information published about that in due course.