Ms Alyson Kilpatrick:

I will return briefly to the issue of the ETAs.

In the North, of course, it is will be UK Border Force primarily that will be asking people for their documentation and they would say they are appalled at the very notion that their officers would profile on a racial basis. It is almost something of a red herring because it does not matter if the UK Border Force is appalled at the notion of racial profiling. What happens with these provisions is that people are immediately fearful that it will be racial profiling. That includes people who are entitled to cross the Border without documentation and those who are not. That includes Irish and British people as well. Some are telling us they are carrying - I am not sure if that noise is coming from here or not - passports just in case. Therefore, the damage is done if one introduces the fear of additional checks even if those checks are not as common as one fears.

In terms of research on numbers, we should confess that will be difficult. I am not sure any of us can provide the committee with those numbers. The people who probably could would be the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Policing Authority in Dublin. They can ask for that information to be collected, disaggregated and then published. We would be saying that it should be.

In terms of funding, I need to be careful here because I would take up the rest of the committee's day if I started talking about our particular funding but I have written quite a bit about it and written a load of begging letters. The level of funding that is being made available to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is undermining both its independence and sending out the signal that human rights are simply not important anymore and certainly not worth investing in.

The extent of cuts to our budget are such that I had to write to the accreditation committee of the United Nations and say that we are not doing all those jobs that it requires of us as a national human rights institution. They have deferred our accreditation and I have to appear in front of them again in October. I am not looking forward to it because I know I will not be able to tell them very much has improved. We asked for an independent review and that is being undertaken. We have to wait and see. That was something we asked for having run out of options.

That is what I would say about funding. We get funds directly from the Northern Ireland Office, the sponsor Department - from the Secretary of State - and Government but the level of money impacts directly on our ability to do our work.

Finally, if anything needs to change in relation to funding of organisations such as all three of ours it is that those appointed to give expert advice and to carry out a statutory function to advise on human rights should be taken seriously when they say what they need to do that properly. If we say we do not have enough money to do our job and, therefore, we are not fit for purpose and we are not advising as we should, that needs to be listened to because if it is not, we simply are not independent anymore. We need to be honest about that.