Dr. Seamus Taylor:

I thank the Deputy. I have one point to clarify about the end of our previous discussion. It needs to be made known that there are not a considerable number of convictions in the United Kingdom, either in Northern Ireland or the UK more widely. Some 130 defendants were convicted of hate crime in Northern Ireland in 2019 and 2020, according to the statistics on the Northern Irish Government website yesterday. Britain has a population of 67.1 million. Some 2% of offences are hate crime. A crime survey in England and Wales captured people's perception of hate incidents. That figure stood at 190,000 in 2018-2019, when it was most recently conducted. A total of 105,090 cases were reported to the police and 12,730 went to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution. There is a difference between what people might perceive and what ultimately ends up being convicted in the system. The response in the UK is quite proportionate and rounded. There is not an enormous number of convictions.

The Deputy asked about disability. It is more challenging than other areas for a number of reasons. All discrimination manifests in different ways. Racial discrimination is not the same as disability discrimination, homophobic attacks or homophobic discrimination. There are commonalities but there are also specifics that pertain to each protected ground. They reflect different histories and ways in which groups are socially patterned across society, whether they are segregated or not. Policy tends to address disabled people in two ways. Disabled people are constructed as needing care and protection, which sees them as vulnerable. The other approach is to construct disabled people as rights-bearing citizens. This complicates the whole disability area because the challenge is how to recognise the hostility in disability hate crime. People ask if we dislike disabled people or hate them. The second challenge is responding appropriately. What I found in the cases I looked at is that cases involving disabled people are often classified as senseless crimes or attacks on vulnerable victims. They are often not recognised for the prejudice underpinning them. As a result, full justice and an appropriate response is often denied. Do I have the time to give the committee an example?