Professor Gerard Quinn:

Those were fantastic questions. I will make one or two comments before I deal with the individual questions. It seems to me there was a culture shift, or what was described last week as an "attitudinal" change, among some of the witnesses before the committee. It is very easy to achieve at a headline level but it is very difficult to have it percolate down into how systems behave and function. It has always seemed to me, or to a close reader of Max Weber, that systems take a lot longer to change than might be envisaged and that they harbour within them the DNA of old ways of thinking. They are not even conscious of that. We have done a pretty good job at headline level but it has not really percolated all that deeply. The litmus test is a crisis, like Covid, whereby one can see the old way of thinking coming directly to the surface. The real challenge concerns how we can bring about systems change so attitudinal change will become a natural reflex of the system, not something to be imposed after the fact and so forth.

The added value of the committee is that it is not just a passive recipient of testimonials from civil society; it has space for deliberative reason. Members can ask the hard questions about what is really going on, identify the blockages, get them out into the light of day and figure out a way of trying to resolve them. That is a great service to government and civil society. In this regard, value is added to the testimonials from civil society. Therefore, I do not regard the committee solely as a passive recipient of the testimonials. I consider the testimonials to be prodding members to ask the harder questions, go deeper and unleash the dynamics for genuine systems change in the future. One reason I believe there is close chemistry between the UNCRPD work that the committee is about to do and the work on the UN sustainable development goals is that the latter are much more intentionally directed at the systems change that needs to be brought about.

Deputy Hourigan talked about how we measure progress and asked what the metrics are for progressive achievement and progressive realisation.

The committee can learn from the international work being done, but at the end of the day it is down to it to decide whether, given X, Y or Z - committee members will know what X, Y and Z are - the Department of Education, for example, is doing enough on inclusive education and so on. There are a lot of metrics out there for slicing and dicing the convention. Sooner or later, one goes down lots of rabbit holes and misses the actual dynamic of change. It is a very tricky thing.

I would say - this comes across in some of the questions, indirectly at least - we have yet to see a real change in service design and delivery in Ireland. This cuts across the board, not just for people with disabilities but for older people as well. We have begun a few things. We had the task force on the individualisation of budgets and services. It seems that is not going as fast it could and that this points to a break-up of the existing architecture for service delivery. It is, almost, an invitation to very different kinds of providers to enter the market. People are talking at the moment about the "Uberisation" of services for people with disabilities and the "you go out there, you discover what suits you" response. This might not necessarily be a traditional service provider but the individual can tailor what is useful to him or her at the end of the day. This has proven itself to be responsive and, also, very efficient and not a waste of taxpayers' money. Somebody asked earlier what the ambition is. That could be a wonderful ambition for Ireland. Ireland will find many allies in the European Association of Service Providers who want to see revolutions in how services are delivered.

On the optional protocol, it is a bit of a mystery to me because Ireland ratified a revised treaty on economic and social rights in the Council of Europe system in April 2000. At the same time, not one day, one year or five years later but on the same day, it also ratified the optional protocol under that convention allowing for complaints. A priori, there is no reason known to me that the optional protocol could not be ratified within the next five minutes. That does not take legislation; it just takes a resolution from both Houses enabling the Government to ratify and so forth. I see an inconsistency in the approach between the CRPD optional protocol and the approach taken under what is called "the revised European Social Charter". Both optional protocols allow for the ventilation of complaints that deal with economic and social rights, which moves this into the debate about progressive realisation. If it was not an obstacle for one ratification, I am not so sure why it should be an obstacle for ratification of an additional protocol. The Government may have been worried that this would be an indirect route to the judicial enforceability of economic and social rights but that cannot be the case because ratification of this international instrument, by no stretch of the imagination, confers extended jurisdiction on the Irish courts to litigate, as it were, these kinds of rights and complaints. I think that was the issue for Deputy Wynne.

The point Senator McGreehan made about equality is interesting. There is a tendency to see the treaty as an external imposition. To me, it is not. It is about reminding us we have already committed to doing this. It is a roadmap that helps us to ask the right questions and to own the process of change. It is not about Geneva or New York dictating but about us internalising these values very deeply. In that sense, I see the treaty as an aid to that process of internalisation. This is something we should be doing. Sometimes, it is not a good idea to do things because the law or an international treaty states we should do it. One has to do something because one believes in it.

Senator Higgins asked a lot of interesting questions, one of which was on development assistance. There is a guidance note being prepared by our development aid people on how to take into account disability in how we spend our moneys, for example, in Africa or places like that. It would be well worth the committee's time to follow that work in conjunction with the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. I am not sufficiently au faitin how this committee would do that but it is a very important piece of work. We will have to answer on that before the UNCRPD committee and so it would be a very interesting piece of work to look at. Senator Higgins also asked what are the other big issues. There was a resolution last year before the UN Security Council, which Ireland is about to join, on protecting civilians with disabilities during armed conflicts. It is an historic resolution. Unfortunately, there are 16 armed conflicts around the world today. The plight of people with disabilities in those countries can only be imagined. There is an ongoing conversation, particularly about peacekeeping operations in disabilities but also about the laws of conflicts and people with disabilities. NATO is doing a lot of work on this issue. It would be nice if Ireland could be encouraged, via this committee or otherwise, to keep this issue on the agenda at the level of the UN Security Council. It would be fully in keeping with our traditions for peacekeeping throughout the world.

As to how one distinguishes between obligations of immediate effect and those that have to be progressively realised, which is the hard question Senator Higgins threw at me, it is complicated and complicated further by the fact that the treaty does not separate them out. Each right is a blending of the two. It is sometimes really hard to disentangle. For example, is everything under Article 12, which deals with legal capacity and assisted decision-making, to be implemented immediately or can a country progressively achieve the supports system we need to put in place to enable people to exercise their rights? It is a bit academic in that context because it is pretty obvious that there are delays in putting support systems in place. Even if one decided that that side of the provision is only to be progressively realised, Ireland is falling short. There is no straightforward answer. It depends on how one reads each particular article. I would be guided by what the UNCRPD committee says in its jurisprudence. Also, retrogressive steps are not necessarily with hostile intention. Periodically, we go through economic ups and downs and this will have implications for resource allocation. International law makes allowance for that. One cannot legislate against economic retrenchments; they just happen in economical cycles. There are limiting principles in how far one can go. The squeaky wheel sometimes gets the oil, but on the other hand, the wheel that does not squeak is punished first. That is something to be avoided at all costs. Hopefully, we are going to bounce back after Covid but even beyond that, there will be some retrenchments within Departments as distinct from between Departments. That is a very interesting issue to look at.

There were one or two other issues raised. The speaker did not use the phrase "outsourcing either to municipal authorities or to private actors" but I am going to use it. There is an important point of principle here, which is the notion of what is called "state responsibility". Even if one delegates to a third party to do X, Y or Z, one cannot avoid liability and answerability for their deficits on the international stage. I remember one country famously took this to mean that when it came to all of the economic and social stuff it had given to private parties, it had no answerability. That is wrong; it retains full answerability.

That is not just under the treaty, it is under general principles of state responsibility in international law. As to universal design, I am not an expert on that but I know it is important.

Reference was made to public procurement debate. The UN has produced a disability inclusion strategy. We are trying to make sure that all its specialised agencies are also inclusive of disability and one of the big debating points is the role of public procurement in making that happen. There are many interesting debates happening around the world on public procurement that we can easily tap into.

Last but not least, getting back to the issue of systems and structural change, we should be looking at the approach of the Australian Government, which is that we should view disability and even old age as a natural contingency and make explicit allowance for it in terms of insurance programmes so that we can adequately fund what is needed into the future. That is the way they are rolling out the personalisation of services in Australia and it is proving to be quite successful so far. It is certainly worth exploring in an Irish context because it would help to get around the stranglehold of very traditional support service structures in this country. I am sorry that I have been very long-winded with my answers.