Ms Sinéad Gibney:

I thank Deputy Tully for her questions. As for our funding, we are a merged institution and an equality and human rights institution. To give the committee a bit of context, we are only now the same size as the bigger of our former legacy bodies, the Equality Authority, was in 2008. That was a single mandate organisation. We are at a point where we have had a straight budget in recent years as we have been able to develop and build as an organisation. We are now, however, turning into what we describe in the human rights and equality world as a multi-mandate organisation. We are taking on new mandates such as this independent monitoring mechanism and, similarly, the co-ordinator role for the mechanism for the optional protocol to the convention against torture, OPCAT. We also took on this year the role of domestic rapporteur for anti-trafficking. We are at an inflexion point where we will seek increases in our budget and an expansion of our overall organisation over the coming years. It is helpful to be able to put that out today, so I thank Deputy Tully for asking the question. We are absolutely ready as we are to act as independent monitoring mechanism but I think it is something we will grow as an organisation over the coming years.

I am also very happy Deputy Tully raised the issue of data. I feel like we are continuing to speak about this at every forum I go to. It is absolutely central to the ability to measure and monitor CRPD implementation. As a national human rights and equality institution, it is critical to all we do. What we cannot measure we cannot change. We do not have at the moment enough disaggregated data in this country for us to identify effectively which groups are being affected by which policies or to address those effectively. A notable feature of the UNCRPD is Article 31, which stipulates that states must collect appropriate statistical data relating to people with disabilities. We have been calling for this, and the OECD, the EU and the UN are consistently calling on public bodies to collect and publish disaggregated data. What we come up against when we do this is a response from the State relating to the GDPR and data privacy, which it believes is a barrier to this. We hold a very strong and clear position that that is not the case and that the collection and publication of this data can be done within the legal confines of data protection law because it is done for non-discrimination purposes and to drive the equality agenda. The failure to maintain disaggregated data does not only run the risk of concealing these human rights and equality violations; it is in itself a significant breach of international human rights law on the part of the State. It is therefore really important to continue to push for better collection and publication of aggregated data. We have put forward recommendations on this and on how the CSO, for example, can play a part in this. We work with Departments to help push on this and we are happy to provide any more information that could be helpful. The Secretary General mentioned the public sector duty. While it is great to see that appearing in the Department's strategy statement, an audit we did showed that, unfortunately, 80% of Departments were not yet in compliance in their most recent round of strategy statements so, again, we really need to push for the public sector duty.