Mr. Liam Herrick:

That is a very broad social and political question. I would say that important aspects of progress have been made. The existence of this committee in the previous Oireachtas and in this Oireachtas is a very important and significant step forward, we believe, in giving visibility to these questions of human rights and equality in the national Parliament. We strongly welcome the publication of the new Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy. We had the opportunity to contribute to that. There are many important and positive attributes in that, not least the consistent measurement of progress against its implementation and the central place it puts on the public sector duty for human rights and equality in the strategy. There are other aspects we would have liked to be stronger but there is good progress and good political will. There is no doubt that underlying social attitudes and prejudice are a problem here but what we are trying to identify, and indeed what the international human rights bodies are trying to identify, is whether there are specific legislative and policy changes that can be made that will make a meaningful difference to people's lives over time. We have identified some of those law reform issues, some of which are modest enough in themselves but would make a step in the right direction. We have a national strategy now but, in terms of its implementation, we would like to see a strong role of measuring human rights and equality measurements against that. As Dr. Elliott has pointed out, one of the great challenges we have is how we can measure progress if we are not counting effectively and efficiently. We are very clear, and Dr. Elliott has led our work on this over several years, that public sector bodies are demonstrating they can do this and some of them are doing it but it is not general yet. It greatly frustrates the aspirations of policymakers like the committee members when they cannot measure the progress and the success or failures of different policies that are introduced.