Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologies for not being able to attend the meeting earlier. I really appreciate the witnesses coming in and all their very detailed submissions.

As a lawyer who has worked in this space I have a real issue with the patchwork of legislation we have, from the Employment Equality Acts and the various amendments to them, to the Equal Status Act, the Maternity Protection Act and the overlay of the Unfair Dismissals Act. We are talking about accessibility but the legislation is not even accessible. I see some of the comments here about whether it should be much more ambitious and I have no doubt all the witnesses, like me, made submissions on the Employment Equality Acts review. We need to be more ambitious here and we really need to look at codifying the legislation. What we have is such a patchwork, including definitions that are inconsistent with each other, and all this is going into a forum where people are not paid legal fees. The rewards are also relatively low, so they are generally going on paying legal fees, which defeats the whole purpose. Cases taken in this area are also highly emotive and there is not really any compensation to reflect that. I really appreciate all the witnesses' submissions on it.

There are a couple of things I want to focus on. Has the socioeconomic ground been included by anywhere else, especially in Europe? It has?