Ms Judy Walsh:

There is an opportunity, certainly, to cover most of the bases, as the Deputy said, in that the WRC will have to be designated an equality body. That has a range of implications for the resourcing of the WRC. In other words, it will have to be properly resourced to carry out all of its functions. It will have to be able to collect data on its own activities. Its accessibility will be put under the spotlight in the process of transposing those directives. On the other side, the other key piece of equality infrastructure, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, is the body that is meant to drive compliance with the law, ensure public sector organisations and private sector bodies understand their obligations and, if necessary, enforce the law through special powers it has. It oversees compliance with the public sector equality and human rights duty, which we discussed as being quite weak in its current formulation. It also has the power to refer cases to the WRC and the general courts, conduct equality reviews and issue codes of practice. It has a suite of powers that should be forensically examined, not just if they are there on paper but whether they have been applied in practice and whether IHREC is adequately resourced to use all of its powers. That is right at the beginning of the directives.