Dr. Mary Murphy:

Many of the evaluations of all of these types of proofing mechanisms ultimately end in asking whether it generated change or actually changed the policy that would have been implemented. It is very hard to get the evidence for this because civil servants in Departments will not say that they changed something after having proofed it. Nonetheless, it seems more that the power of the proofing mechanism is what it does to the overall capacity of society to hold the democratic system to account regarding the distribution of resources. That is about using the more transparent and accountability-related mechanisms and bringing more alive the capacity of society to hold Governments to account about the distribution of resources, and there are very many ways IHREC can engage in doing that. One of them is coming into an expert committee and stating whether something is of good enough quality or not. It may not be the best way for us to do that, and choosing to do that may distract from or deter us from other potential roles that might actually be more fruitful, so it is worth thinking about that, but-----