Mr. Niall Brunell:

The Senator asked a question about what scoping we have done for the legislative programmes of other Departments. It is not necessarily for me to get into the fine detail of other Departments' or other Ministers' legislative programmes, but we do assess whether the State is broadly compliant with the CRPD. In particular, the Department of Justice, prior to ratification of the CRPD, produced a roadmap for legislative reform at domestic level that would be required to comply with the convention. One major part of that that was recently accomplished was assisted decision-making, which encompassed elements of the Disability (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill that lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Dáil. That exercise is done, but we are reliant on other Departments that, in fairness, are juggling competing priorities and demands in looking at the wider programme of legislative reform.

As regards ratification of the optional protocol and reservations to the convention, the Senator is absolutely correct in saying reservations are not themselves a reason not to press ahead with something. The purpose of reservations is really to clarify what a country means when it ratifies an international instrument. Considering that an international instrument is drafted to apply to every country on earth, there will be particular circumstances in which a particular country might wish to say, "To be clear, in the context of our legal system, this is what we mean when we ratify this article." That is very much the approach Ireland takes to ratifying conventions when it lodges reservations.

As regards ratification of the optional protocol itself, in the first instance the ratification of any international treaty is a matter for the Government so it is always a Cabinet decision. We have engaged with the Attorney General's office on the requirements for ratification and with the Department of Foreign Affairs, which takes a lead role in the ratification of international instruments. We are moving through a comprehensive scoping exercise. This is primarily from a perspective of due diligence. The optional protocol is a little different from other binding international treaties because we are talking about rights. I do not want to compare apples and oranges but, if I may use a loose example, if Ireland were looking at entering a binding international treaty on trade, it would be expected that we would scope out fully all the potential ramifications for our domestic legal system before we would ratify. That is the exercise we are doing now in order that our Minister can bring a robust proposal forward for ratification. It will be a Government decision as to whether it is ratified and at what stage. We had intended to have a scoping exercise with a legal focus finished earlier this year. We went to tender looking for particular expertise to assist with that. As the tender process did not give us the result we were looking for, we are tweaking it and we will go back out to market over the coming weeks. We hope to see something later this year to assist us. Ratification of the protocol is in the programme for Government. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, have gone on record as saying they are open to it, and we are working through the requirements for it.