Dr. Niall Muldoon:

On the domestic, sexual and gender-based violence strategy, the third strategy, it is the first time we as a nation have acknowledged children as victims of domestic violence and not just witnesses. It is a huge step forward and something we are delighted with. Probably 18 months ago, we met with a consultant who was helping to bring together the strategy and were asked if we would be willing to be involved in monitoring the actions. It was something we had to consider. We get that request often but I do not think we have ever taken it up before. We felt in this situation it might be appropriate to lend the weight of the office to this new initiative and new way of seeing children. Tens of thousands of children are affected in this way. We took a look and said we would do it but needed new resources to make it happen. We could not do it with the resources we had. There was agreement that would be the case.

I met the Minister for Justice last year and the resources were not forthcoming for 2023 so we are in negotiations with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, which has the Vote for our funding, and the Department of Justice to ensure that will be available as soon as possible. If all goes well we should be able to advertise by possibly September which means we will be 18 months into the strategic plan before we start looking at monitoring, which is not ideal from our point of view and which we think is unfair. Our hope and objective is to provide that monitoring element. We think the strategic plan has been hugely important and all the people more directly involved in domestic and gender-based violence see it as very positive, but the monitoring will be hugely important. To call somebody out and say they are not doing it, not doing it at the right pace or not doing it in the way they said they would will be important. We are disappointed we have not been able to hit the ground running earlier but we hope that will change.

On incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the essence of incorporating it is it becomes an umbrella for all our legislation and how we do our work. I will call out one we have called out many times: the legislation on housing and homelessness for local authorities does not mention children. It mentions dependants. It does not ask the local authorities to consider that you have a child here and that in turn changes what you need to provide for that person. That is one of the best examples. The incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has happened in Scotland and has changed the way they do many things. The Department of agriculture will never think about children. They do not think it is relevant. The Department of environment might not. Nor will Departments of rural affairs, islands and Gaeltacht – but children are impacted by every one of those. If they are making a decision on what finance they want, how they want it and where it will be used, children should be considered. That is why we are looking for it. It changes the way our Civil Service and public service do their business, which is what we are looking to do. It puts children at the heart of it.

On special measures, I refer to the child's rights impact assessment we did in regard to Covid. I ask my colleague, Ms Gill, to speak on that.