Mr. Liam Herrick:

On the question of resources for the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, I could make a number of points. We recognise that, in recent years, the financial and staffing resources made available to us by the State have increased, and we welcome that, but we would also repeat the point we have made to the Government that, over the last number of years, we have been given by the Oireachtas and Government a number of additional mandates and functions, but we have not always received additional funds. This week, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women made a recommendation to the State that when additional mandates are given to us or any statutory oversight body that is independent, there needs to be a requisite allocation of resources. The risk is that in giving us additional functions without additional resources, it will weaken our capacity to do our job. We welcome those additional functions, such as being an independent monitoring mechanism for the rights of people with disability, or being an independent rapporteur on the State's application for human trafficking, and we hope to have other functions in the future with regard to artificial intelligence and detention.

On the question of the integration of UNCRPD across Departments, it is probably early for us to make an assessment of whether the new task force run out of the Department of the Taoiseach is going to be an effective mechanism but I would point out that, under our founding statute, all public bodies, including Departments and State agencies, have a statutory obligation to integrate human rights and equality into their policies and practices. We monitor the fulfilment of that obligation by all public bodies. They have to integrate human rights and equality into their strategies and we have to see it being put into effect. What we are seeing across all human rights and equality standards is an improvement and there are more bodies coming in line all the time. There is progress but still less than half of all public bodies are fully complying with their obligations. There is work to be done but there is progress at the same time.

The disability-specific question is probably difficult to assess at this time. We are all conscious that the national strategy has not been published. It makes it difficult to see even an overall framework for such integration.