Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 22 September 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement
EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement: Discussion
Ms Sin?ad Gibney:
I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh very much for that question. I will answer as much as I can and Ms Kilpatrick might jump in if she has anything further to add to this question.
As Ms Kilpatrick has said, she is the youngest of all three of us, in that we have all have started in the past two to two and half years. Obviously, that is historically just before our term of office. As the Deputy has said, the charter of rights was set out in the Good Friday Agreement as something that the joint committee would pursue and at the time there have been what I would describe as a couple of bursts of activity towards that. Although that was set out as something that could be pursued in the 2011 report, the focus since then, and between 2016 and 2020, has been very much around the implications of Brexit. This charter of rights proposal has not progressed in any meaningful way is my direct answer to the Deputy on that. There is a point in time in which this could always be reviewed and looked at again. I must say that the priority is and should right now be the dedicated mechanisms and the work of those units. This is certainly something that we can explore. I might suggest to the Deputy that the team might follow up with her to document exactly where that work that has happened, and more than that, within the intervening 11 years since the issuing of that report. As I say, this proposal has not advanced in any meaningful way. Would Ms Kilpatrick wish to add anything to that?
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