Professor Gerard Quinn:

That is a fantastic set of questions. With respect to Deputy Tully's question on the terms of reference, I suggest she goes back and has a look at the Inter-Parliamentary Union report on the role of parliaments. There are two or three other parliaments in the world that are very active, including the New Zealand Parliament. The European Parliament has a group on disability. It does not match exactly what a national parliament does but nevertheless it would be worthwhile to have conversations with colleagues in those settings to get their view. My sense of it, having watched previous proceedings of the committee, is that Ireland had been doing pretty well. We have a lot of law on the books. It has not been commenced and for whatever reason it has been held back. One of the committee's initial jobs of work will be not just to expose that this has happened but to ask why and ask the deeper questions about what are the inhibiting factors holding this back. Then it will be for the committee to make a judgment on whether there has been sufficient progressive realisation of the rights in Ireland. The UN committee can make this judgment from afar but it is much better that this committee makes it in Dublin and puts it finger on what systemic changes are needed to unleash the process of change. Whether the committee likes its or not, probably one of its first jobs of work will be to try to figure out what is going on, why these things are being held up and whether there is a way it can actually fix them.

With respect to Senator O'Loughlin's question on voice and including people with disabilities, let me backtrack a little bit. Most international treaties set out a number of benchmarks and norms and then it is for governments to figure out how to apply them and work them out. This treaty is a bit different. It states there is a transmission belt between New York and Dublin, or Berlin, Johannesburg or wherever, or between Geneva and Dublin, which requires Dublin to get its act together. It actually imagines what the process for domestic implementation and domestic monitoring would look like. This is Article 33 of the convention. It is a very unusual provision in any international convention. Arguably, it should have been in all of the other conventions, and many people say the disability convention actually delivers on the original intent of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, going back to the 1940s and the 1950s, which got sidetracked by the Cold War and other elements. It is a very simple construct. It is that governments act smartly and that there would be a focal point and co-ordination mechanism within government. We can go down a rabbit hole on the technicalities of this but the thinking behind it is simple. It is that if regular people fall between the cracks, so what as they will recover, but for people with disabilities and people living on the margins, falling between the cracks is a luxury we cannot afford so we have to have more smart governance in place to try to deal with this.

Governments have to actively collaborate with civil society on the production of policy. This is what a lot of people call the co-production of social policy. It is probably the future anyhow for many different issues and many different groups. It just happens to be mandated by the treaty. In the drafting of the treaty, many civil society groups turned up and governments were very fearful of this at the beginning but towards the end of the process they were competing with one another to say they had listened better and had taken on board better what the various groups were saying. Suddenly the penny dropped that this is the way to move forward. This is why Article 4.3 is written into the convention. It requires active consultation with people with disabilities and their representative organisations. One of the tricky issues here is what is a representative organisation. Even if it is representative, are there some voices that are not heard to which we should reach out?

The convention imagines there would be a reality check in terms of an independent framework for monitoring progress made in implementation. This monitoring framework is the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission alongside two or three others. When I was listening last week, I was struck that the legislation that specifically posits this in place has still not been enacted. The convention requires this legislation be enacted. In an ideal situation we would not want to be before the UN committee defending setting up the framework without having the legislation in place. This is part of the catch up the committee will have to have a look at.

By the way, and I was trying to figure out how to make this point before the committee, there is another article that the committee might want to have a close look at, perhaps in conjunction with the foreign affairs committee. Article 32 of the convention requires countries such as Ireland to make sure its foreign policy and development assistance programme is also inclusive of people with disabilities. Why is this relevant? Ireland's development assistance builds schools in Africa. Are they inclusive? Is the education system being put in place inclusive? This is a question of value for money for the Irish taxpayer as much as anything else but perhaps there is a way the committee can examine it with the foreign affairs committee.

I thank Senator Bacik for her kind words. With regard to community living and the right to live independently and be included in the community, the reason we did not call it independent living in the text was because everybody was aware of what happened in the early 1980s with people with disabilities and others being dumped on the streets in various countries. We thought the language was a little bit debased and, therefore, a separate language is applied, which is living independently and being included in the community.

There are many tensions and one of the most important is between autonomy rights, that is, the right of people to choose where they live and with whom they live versus the mandate for community living. One of the arguments made before the task force on ending congregated settings way back in 2010 and 2011 was that we cannot assume a person will not choose to live in an institution, therefore let us keep the funding stream going to enable them to live in an institution. This was actually taken seriously back then. To its credit, the committee on ending congregated settings dismissed this argument and said the right to live in the community is the right to choose how to live in a community and not whether to live in a community. I was very mindful listening to the testimony last week that some people were making a distinction between the cultural shift and some of the technical interpretations of the culture shift.

The way I saw the report on the ending of congregated settings is that if it is viewed through the cultural shift, valuing people living and flourishing in the community, then that magic figure of four that was mentioned last week really boils down to two, that is to say, one choosing to live with somebody with a disability while the other would be people without disabilities and not the service providers. That was very important. That was the original vision of the report on ending congregated settings. Some countries around the world have used it as a model and are now far ahead of us.

I will end by saying that the controversy about the Structural Fund continues. This is taxpayers' money that is being used in some countries to build institutions for people with disabilities. They are not called institutions anymore. They are downsizing to what they call hostels, of 12 to 14 people, in some countries, but to us they are institutions. It is a running scandal within the European institutions about how to end this. I am sorry that they were long-winded answers but the questions were really good too.