Ms Sin?ad Gibney:

I will pick up on a few aspects of the Senator's contribution but I might first address the Chair's comments. The first report we are here to talk about contains a set of recommendations from the researchers, and I pay credit to the excellent team of researchers led by Colin Murray. To be clear, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, respecting our specific remit, jurisdiction and mandate, joins our colleagues in making only two specific policy recommendations because, obviously, the commitment is on the UK Government, so most of the recommendations and work on this relate to the United Kingdom.

I wanted to provide clarity around prioritisation.

Regarding Senator Currie's question about rights and equality and how we can keep them central, for me, this is a really helpful step in understanding the complexity of the protection of rights and equality post Brexit. From the research, we can understand the different types of alignment. For example, we talk about dynamic alignment compared with the stricter keeping pace set. A picture emerges whereby the protection of rights and equality in Northern Ireland is going to be a complex proposal, particularly within the legal sphere. This will involve mapping out what laws have to keep pace versus what ones are using the dynamic alignment, and how they move, how the implication of further judgments might impact on some of the annex directives and so on. It contains a lot of complexity. We need to start to understand what that is going to look like on a practical level. I urge the committee to maintain its focus and priority on rights and equality and bring that focus into the dialogue.

The second recommendation we have signed up to calls for the Irish Government, Northern Ireland Executive and UK Government to work to enhance and harmonise equality and human rights protections. We do not go any further in saying, for example, how the Irish Government might operationalise that recommendation. However, it merits being discussed by the committee. For example, is it something that can happen in the existing infrastructure of the British-Irish Council and the relevant bodies that Senator Currie listed? Alternatively, is it the case that new forums need to be established to facilitate the dialogue about post-Brexit rights and equality, with a divergence being central to the discussion? We need to ensure that rights and equality remain central to the agenda. Perhaps they were not as prominent as we would have liked throughout the process of Brexit. I am delighted that the committee invited us back and that it continues to look at this area and keep it front and centre on its agenda.

Regarding the common travel area, CTA, and the electronic travel authorisation, ETA, Ms Kilpatrick will be able to speak about this as well. I remind the committee of the publication we put forward prior to Brexit in which we looked at the CTA. It was part of the joint committee work of the NIHRC and IHREC. We put forward a recommendation that the CTA be placed on a statutory footing. I think many legislators would agree with this. That is a really valuable document. We are happy to recirculate it to members of the committee to enable them to refresh their minds on its contents. Even though it is a few years old, it is still very relevant and pertinent.

As Ms Kilpatrick said in her introduction, although we are happy that there has been some mitigation in terms of the steps taken on the ETA, we have many concerns. Senator Currie's call about tourism is correct. I have spoken to people who tell me that Fáilte Ireland puts packages together for cross-Border marketing of tourism in Ireland. The fact that people are now going to be facing checks is really problematic. Hopefully, that is one area where we can advance it. We also have concerns, as Ms McGahey has mentioned, around some of those minority groups and how they might be impacted by it.