Ms Carol Baxter:

We work across our teams to make sure that each of the strategies has an intersectional approach and that the approaches speak to each other. This afternoon we will meet the National Women's Council of Ireland and one of the issues is how the forthcoming national strategy for women and girls can integrate a strong focus on Traveller women. We are working across the teams internally in the Department. Each of the strategies has committed to an intersectional approach, which is very important. One of the issues in the annual report will be to what degree we have effectively brought forward that intersectionality. That will be very important.

To return to implementation, one of the key pieces that fed into the development of NTRIS II was that we got the Centre for Effective Services to do an evaluation of implementation of three of the previous equality strategies, those being NTRIS I, the National Strategy for Women and Girls and the Migrant Integration Strategy. It came forward with very good implementation recommendations and these informed our approach in terms of actions being strong and targeted KPIs using measurable data. The next National Strategy for Women and Girls has not yet been finalised and the National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People is fresh off the press. We are at the beginning of the process and implementation in each case is one of the key things.

There are four dedicated officials on our Tusla team and other teams working on Traveller and Roma issues across Government Departments. The key aspect as we said is a whole-of-government approach because we recognise that structural issues require whole-of-government responses.