Mr. Pádraig Naughton:

Some of the legislation that has been passed in the Houses in recent years has made a difference. I am one of the people who appeared before this committee in the past, in 2018. I made the point that the fact the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014 did not have a legal remedy within it was a weakness. However, the Department, and by extension the Arts Council, is now really pushing arts organisations to comply with their public sector duty and that is making a considerable difference. It has resulted in many arts organisations taking on equality, diversity and inclusion in a really meaningful way. I was one of a ten-person steering group which worked with the Project Arts Centre to develop its new EDI policy, and I have worked with Baboró in Galway on its LEAP project. As a result of that push from the Department and the Arts Council, many organisations are now involved proactively in pushing equality, diversity and inclusion, and getting under the hood to see what could make a difference. To that end, the arts participation organisations, such as Arts & Disability Ireland, Create, the Waterford Healing Arts Trust and Age & Opportunity, in particular with Bealtaine, have been working together over the past year on how, collectively, we can achieve that intersectionality regarding diversity, which Dr. Murphy mentioned.

Some of these measures are slowly making a difference but sometimes peace is slow. I commend the legislation on the difference that, many years on, it is beginning to make.