Mr. Daniel Holder:

I thank the Senator for her kind words. We are pleased the information is useful. We are in a pretty dire situation. Clearly, the institutions, as they stand, simply cannot deliver on equality and rights because the array of vetoes that are available to opponents of equality, who project disproportionate power in that sector, means it is almost impossible to get things progressed, even when there are commitments in existing agreements, even when there is a majority in the Assembly, even when there is a majority on the Northern Ireland Executive and even, with specific reference to the anti-poverty strategy and the Irish language strategy, where the commitments constitute binding domestic legal obligations. We applied for a judicial review in 2015 over the failure to adopt the anti-poverty strategy and the Executive was found to have been acting unlawfully. I do not mean to tar all the parties on the Executive with the one brush as in fact, four or five parties welcomed the ruling on the anti-poverty strategy. Similarly, on the Irish language strategy, a judicial review was brought by Conradh na Gaeilge, representing Irish speakers.

The problem is the system commitments are being reneged on by the UK Government but we do not have the system in place that was planned for under the Good Friday Agreement. We have a different system that has been taken in a different direction since the St. Andrews Agreement and that needs to be reviewed. Under the St. Andrews Agreement, the veto I mentioned has been used at least six times during this mandate, namely, three times to block the progress of issues that relate to international obligations on women’s reproductive rights and medical abortion services, twice to block the Minister of Health, Robin Swann's, Covid measures, and once to block an SDLP request to ask the UK Government for an extended Brexit deadline.

The use of that veto, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Many Ministers, when they are approached, might say an issue is something they are in favour of but that it is not within their power to take the decision because doing so would be controversial or significant and that, therefore, they must defer to the full Northern Ireland Executive. In a period without an Executive and with caretaker Ministers, as will possibly be the case after the next election, we will really see how that veto can simply derail any sort of progress within power-sharing.

Another veto has been used regularly by DUP Ministers to block items going onto the agenda of discussion of the Northern Ireland Executive, including many rights-based issues, such as organ donation and welfare reform. The effort to reform the petition of concern and return it partially to what it was under the Good Friday Agreement, which has led to the petition of concern being untenable, with none of them having been tabled during the current mandate, has simply displaced it onto other vetoes. As for what needs to be done, we need a full-scale review involving both Governments - the Irish Government is co-guarantor of the agreement - to try to put into place the actions that were originally agreed as mechanisms under the agreement.

I might deal with the legacy question before handing over to Ms Boyd to answer the questions on the common travel area. As the Senator will be aware, we are very alarmed by the legacy proposals. The UK Government has not just put forward an amnesty that is worse than that which was introduced by General Pinochet but it has also ended all meaningful investigations into conflict-related deaths. There are two areas where the Irish Government can intervene. One issue that has caught on is something of a false narrative from the UK Government that, at face value, is quite attractive but in reality is just false. The UK Government is trying to present its legacy package such that everything that was proposed under the Stormont House Agreement focuses on criminal justice and prosecutions, and that we need to dispense with that and look at a different truth recovery mechanism. That is simply a false narrative in the sense that the existing mechanisms focus extensively on truth recovery, as we have seen over recent months. There have been two Police Ombudsman reports, both of which are more than 300 pages long, with huge quantities of information recovery and detail on human rights violations. The Ballymurphy inquest, which, again, is a truth recovery exercise, comes under the existing mechanisms. The Stormont House Agreement focused on truth recovery with teeth, whereby there would be a body in the historical investigations unit that would have police-type powers to get to the truth and to produce family reports. What is now proposed by the UK has none of those powers. It is a body reliant on the disclosure of some documents and voluntary co-operation, with a veto vested in UK ministers as to what content is then delivered to families. Countering that narrative whereby this is somehow a shift from criminal justice to information recovery is very important.

If the UK goes ahead with what is an outrageous legacy Bill, it would be up to the Government here to challenge that legally through international institutions, particularly through an interstate case brought to the European Court of Human Rights. This has happened previously, of course, in the context of torture, in the Ireland v. United Kingdom case. Clearly, that will be an avenue if the UK should proceed with this legacy Bill, which we know is not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, as the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights has made clear. That is one way the Irish Government could intervene.

Ms Boyd might comment on the CTA questions.