Dr. Aideen Hartney:

Not at all. I thank the Senator for his questions.

As regards the optional protocol, my understanding is that the approach is the same as that the Government took to ratification of the convention itself, that is, Ireland has a long-standing policy of trying to have its legislative ducks in a row before it ratifies an international treaty. The main effort, I think, was to get issues such as these as regards decision-making legislation across the line before ratifying the optional protocol. A previous commitment had been that the Government would ratify post Ireland's first reporting cycle. I understand there is a willingness to look at that with a slightly earlier timeframe now. That is the main thing. One of the things we said earlier was that there is a huge appetite out there for the ratification of the optional protocol, and rightly so, but that it provides for avenues of appeal where all national levels of appeal have been exhausted. There is probably still some work to be done to ensure that those national avenues of access are accessible to everybody and that everybody is aware of them because perhaps more could be done at national level before it would need to go to the level of invoking the optional protocol.

In response to the Senator's broader question, do we detect an improvement, I am a historian by background so I always tend to see the glass as half full as to what has been achieved, particularly over the 20 years the NDA has been in existence. When one looks at it over that timeframe, some of the mechanisms and apparatuses within society that were not there at the time the NDA was founded have since been introduced, and moves are being made in the right direction. I think the arc of history is moving towards the positive but we would all probably agree that progress has not been as fast as anyone would like, and there have been instances of two steps forward, one back. There is certainly lots more to be done, but I do think Ireland is moving in the right direction. Certainly, as the Senator himself said, some of the narrative is very steadily moving away from the old charitable model and people with disabilities as recipients of care. While it is not at the level it should be yet, there is a growing recognition of people as rights holders in common with everybody else in society.

As for the routine discrimination the Senator spoke about, I do not know if Dr. Tamming or Mr. Hunt want to say anything about the report we launched yesterday or what it shows.