Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The role of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission is critical. It needs to be completely independent of Government in order that it can, where necessary, and independent of any Government pressure, make critiques of any Government failure to uphold human rights or equality principles. The State has failed very badly in many of these areas. I ask the House to think of the plight of children in emergency accommodation and how their rights are not being upheld; of Travellers, whom the State has systematically failed and continues to fail in many areas of equality and human rights; of the failure to secure the rights of refugees living in direct provision centres and of the completely unacceptable hardships imposed particularly on children in direct provision; and of the failure of the Government to deliver on its promise to take in 4,000 programme refugees, Syrian refugees, a failure highlighted by one of the unsuccessful candidates for the commission positions we are deciding today. I refer to Betty Purcell who, as part of her work for IHREC, had produced a conference on this matter. The Government was publicly embarrassed in respect of this failure by Betty Purcell. I have no doubt about the credentials and the bona fides of those who have been nominated. I welcome the fact that they include representatives of the disability community, people who work in the area of housing and so on. I am sure all the people who have been selected will serve well and be important voices.

There is, however, a real problem with this process. It is not independent. The criteria which were established for the selection of candidates, and effectively for the exclusion of a whole range of candidates who had impeccable human rights credentials, were passed through the Minister's office in an email which, I understand, was not on what is called the shared drive - in other words, the formal process of communications surrounding issues relating to the selection and nomination process - but went from the commissioner's office to the Department and then back to the Public Appointments Service. The email stressed that the commission would particularly benefit from additional skills in finance and corporate governance and stated the commission had sufficient expertise in the area of gender equality. The thing about this is that having a preference for people with finance and corporate governance skills, first of all, has nothing to do with human rights. It also disqualifies people who, for example, may not have played such roles but who have impeccable and important credentials in the area of the advocacy of human rights and equality principles, particularly if they are from small NGOs. What if one is part of a small NGO that does not have such experience? I understand only one member of the interview panel asked questions about human rights and equality issues and that the overwhelming emphasis in the interviews was on corporate and financial governance. These are not acceptable criteria, nor is the interference of the Government in deciding these criteria when we are talking about a body that absolutely needs to be independent. It is worth noting that the United Nations Paris Principles state that the institutions set up to protect and uphold human rights principles should be absolutely independent from government, whereas the legislation as it currently stands states, "The Minister shall agree with the Service the selection criteria and process to be implemented in respect of the filling of any vacancy." This is wrong. It should not be the Minister who decides the selection criteria. At best, it should be the all-party Oireachtas committee, where these selection criteria would be decided in an open, transparent and public way, rather than with the potential for interference by the Minister depending on his or her particular views on these matters.

I will not oppose the motion because I am sure the people who have been nominated are very good. However, it is worrying that people such as Michael Farrell did not even get an interview and that people such as Carol Coulter, Ursula Barry, Betty Purcell and so on were effectively excluded on the basis of some of the criteria that were included-----

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