Dr. Cl?ona Saidl?ar:

We would like there to be a conversation. Right now, we would not like to say what the body would look like exactly. It has to mirror how the agency takes shape, as that will dictate the monitoring relationship. One of the Council of Europe's criticisms of implementation was that countries were just tagging on another job to existing agencies and that that continual adding on was itself problematic.

If we look at what we have already in Ireland in terms of different types of monitoring mechanisms, our ombudsmen all do different things. They are set up in different ways. We have had a rapporteur system for children that has been effective in many ways but we really need to pay attention to the criticisms that Professor Conor O'Mahony laid out. One of those was that there was no statutory basis for the rapporteur. There was a whole load of stuff that the rapporteur could not access, particularly around family law and the in camera rule and in research and really understanding the critical issues that the child rapporteur needed to look at. Without a statutory basis this could not be done. We need to think about the enabling mechanisms to a statute that a monitoring oversight body needs. It might also include the capacity to protect and hold data as well so that it knows what it is looking at.