Mr. Liam Herrick:

If you or I believe we are discriminated against with regard to accessing a restaurant that does not have a licence, for example, or a shop that sells clothes, groceries or whatever, then a discrimination case would go to the Workplace Relations Commission, which inherited the previous functions of the Equality Tribunal. This was to do with reorganisation more than ten years ago. Uniquely, cases of discrimination involving licensed premises go to the District Court. What we have found in our analysis of this over the years, and we are about to produce new analysis on this, is that in effect this has led to problems of access to justice, cost and so on. Very often there have been poor outcomes. We have intervened in many of these cases ourselves. We do not think the justification for the specialist treatment of licensed premises stacks up at this point in time. The Government has committed to addressing this issue and we hope this happens shortly.