Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Lady Trimble, you are welcome.

Thank you very much for your invitation to give evidence to your Committee. I listened with great interest to the presentation by my old friend, Jeffrey Dudgeon, and the questioning by the Committee, so it is good to be here. I am here because I was a member of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) that presented its report to the Secretary of State way back in 2008. Of course, I was one of two dissenting members, and I will come back to that issue. Before I do that, however, I will talk a little bit about the human rights context.

Prior to 1998, Britain had been a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) for a good many years, and that was the human rights background against which the Belfast Agreement was agreed in 1998. I know from bitter personal experience, more than most, just how difficult it was to achieve that agreement. I also know how much discussion went into every clause and word of that agreement. The agreement was achieved, however, and it contained the provisions for the creation of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and charged it with the obligation:

I make no apology for reading that out in full, because it is important for your deliberations.

The human rights discussion in Northern Ireland did not start with the Belfast Agreement. Before that, we had the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights (SACHR). It presented annual reports on human rights, and I know that you have heard from one of its members, my former colleague Dermot Nesbitt. I heard Dermot being referred to earlier. In 1988, my husband was a member of a working group that published a report on human rights and responsibilities in Britain and Ireland. That was way back in 1988. Incidentally, one of its recommendations was to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. Of course, that happened 10 years later, in 1998, shortly after the Belfast Agreement, with the Human Rights Act.

I mention that sequence of events, with which, I am sure, you are all familiar, just to indicate that human rights have a long history in the Northern Ireland context. They are not the preserve of one community to assert its rights over the other community.

The Human Rights Commission spent 10 years on the bill of rights work. The first set of commissioners, under Brice Dickson, who has given evidence to you, all resigned in disagreement. I know that Brice has modified his views since leaving the commission. The second set of commissioners on the Human Rights Commission, which I joined in 2007, produced a report in 2008, which I dissented from and which was totally rejected by the Government. The Government agreed with my view.

There is nothing easy when it comes to human rights. I really do not envy you your task. I listened to Professor Colin Harvey, who was a member of the commission with me, recommend that you dust down that report. It recommended over 80 additional rights, which, together with the Human Rights Act 1998, would form a Northern Ireland bill of rights. They included many socio-economic rights that had nothing to do with the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland and do not appear in any human rights Act anywhere else in the UK or across Europe. It was and remains my view that the Human Rights Commission exceeded its remit. If it had been less ambitious in wanting to produce — Jeff used this phrase — an all-singing, all-dancing bill of rights and had instead concentrated on issues that went to the heart of our conflict, such as victims, survivors and parading, we might have ended up with something, and something rather than nothing is a win.

I mentioned healthcare in my written submission, and I will add a little to what I said. First, the Human Rights Commission's proposals talked about progressive realisation.

That concept is not new to human rights activists, but it does not appear in any of the human rights legislation in our jurisdiction or across Europe. Northern Ireland is a small region, and the Assembly is a subordinate legislature. Is it sensible to have an elaborate set of rights that may well, in truth, add nothing at all to the provision of healthcare but just give the appearance of creating a new right?

Healthcare is not mentioned in the Human Rights Act or in the European Convention on Human Rights, but, in our society, the NHS giving healthcare free at the point of delivery is embedded in our DNA. We all consider it a right, and it is a right, and we have every confidence — I certainly do — that it will continue to be a right for generations to come. It is part of the fabric of our society, and any party that presented itself to the electorate on the basis of changing the concept of healthcare being free at the point of delivery would be given short shrift by the electorate.

The right to free healthcare is not under threat, but the NHS is under huge strain. Even before the COVID pandemic, waiting lists, particularly in Northern Ireland, were shockingly long in some disciplines. You will know more about the length of the waiting lists than I do. We have now seen NHS resources having to be diverted to caring for COVID patients and, thankfully, administering vaccines. Some 13 million vaccines have been administered to date. Yes, I have had my vaccine. Hooray. We all know, however, that people have died prematurely, and will continue to die prematurely, because of the unavailability of medical care that would have been expected before the pandemic. That is the situation that we are in.

If the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission's proposals were now in force, and if, for example, a cancer patient whose treatment has had to be delayed owing to COVID were to take a legal case, a judge would have to decide on whether the allocation of resources by the Executive was compliant with the bill of rights. The judge would therefore be drawn into deciding whether the Government should have taken money out of, say, housing, the economy or wherever to put into the health budget in these exceptional times. None of us could have predicted that two years ago. This is a political judgement, and it is, in my view, quite properly the domain of politicians to make those decisions. That is what politicians are for. That is a hypothetical example, and I trust that it will remain hypothetical.

I know that you have taken evidence from a number of very distinguished judges, and my sense, from reading their evidence, is that they have no desire to be drawn into the political arena. Sir Stephen Irwin's remarks particularly impressed me. He put it very well. I will repeat a sentence or two that resonated with me. He said:

The issue here is not just the politicisation of the judiciary but the extent of the cases that would potentially be brought. Would legal aid be available, and, if so, how much extra would that cost? You will have to look at that. What would be the expected extra workload for the legal system? If no legal aid is available, the points that I made in my written submission about NGOs and wealthy individuals become very relevant, and that touches on what Jeff referred to as judicial activism.

Before I finish, I will say a few words about the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland. In my view, we need to look back to the Belfast Agreement and the context in which it came about in order to discern what is meant here. In Northern Ireland, we suffered decades of conflict. Our people were divided on ethnic, religious and political grounds. Mutual hostility led to a near boycott of the other in political, economic and social life. That is a simplification of a very complex situation, and I thought long and hard about what words I would use there. The agreement set out the constitutional and political arrangements as a way of living together and preventing continued paramilitarism. It is that bitter division that the participants in the agreement were contemplating when they asked the Human Rights Commission to consider whether there were rights that could contribute to alleviating that division. It did not have the answers then. The Human Rights Commission did not come up with something that could be agreed. That is now your task. It is not easy. If it were, it would have been done by now. Good luck to your Committee. I wish you very well in your deliberations.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Thank you very much, Lady Trimble, for your written presentation and for the oral presentation that you have just given us.

The point that you finished with was about the particular circumstances of the conflict. The conflict in the North came about as a result of partition and the state that followed. Discrimination was the order of the day. There was systemic discrimination and a denial of rights to one section of the community. Following on from that, is it not appropriate that, as a means of dealing with that — this is borne out by what happened in 1998 — we have rights for everyone? Obviously, rights are universal. Christopher referred earlier to rights being imposed by certain parties and not others, but my view is that rights are enforced or introduced for everyone, regardless of —.

Mr Stalford: Excuse me, Chair. I need to clarify that. I was talking about the content of any potential bill of rights being imposed; I did not say that I was against rights. I was talking about the content of the document. We meet as a Committee to consider what will go in at the end. The point of these hearings is that people have different interpretations of rights and how they are best delivered. It is important for me to put that on record.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Absolutely. I do not think that I misrepresented what you said: you talked about a bill of rights being imposed. In my view, rights being introduced would not be an imposition on anyone; rather, they would be for the good and the benefit of the entire community, regardless of your background or political affiliation.

We already have rights. All of the rights in the Human Rights Act and in the European Convention on Human Rights apply to every individual in the territory. Those rights are individual rights for every person, whether nationalist, unionist or whatever. The idea behind a bill of rights is that the rights should be universal for everybody, whether it be a prisoner in Maghaberry, an asylum seeker or whoever. We already have a significant number of rights.

I spent quite a lot of my presentation talking about healthcare. Healthcare is not something that the Human Rights Act includes, but it is a right. It is enshrined in all sorts of legislation. If you go through the Acts of Parliament of the United Kingdom, you will find that the National Health Service was set up immediately post-war; in fact, it was set up around about the same time as the discussions that led to the European Convention on Human Rights occurred. I do not know why healthcare was not included, but it was not. It is a right, however. There is nobody in our society who would argue that there is no right to healthcare. It is there as a right. It is not enshrined in a bill of rights as such, but it is no less a right. Something does not have to be enshrined in a bill of rights to be available as a right to each individual.

The intention of a bill of rights, as I understand it, is that it will be a foundational document that any subsequent legislation will have to be compliant with, so you must be certain that the concepts and ideals that go into it are ones that you want to endure for a very long time. The idea behind your Committee is that a bill of rights, which we do have, in the sense in that we have the Human Rights Act, will endure for a very long time and that the Assembly and the Executive will have to comply with those rights. If you get those wrong, how do you change them? We have been talking about additions to the Human Rights Act since 1998 and have not come up with anything yet. It is an extremely difficult task that you have, and you have to think long and carefully about what you put into it. The fact that you do not put something into a bill of rights does not mean that it is not a right for people. It is there in other aspects of our law. You are not saying that something is not a good thing if you exclude it from a bill of rights, Rather, you are saying, "We have what we have, and that'll do us for now".

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Thank you. You referred in your paper to the possible negative implications of the North ending up with more rights or with a stronger bill of rights than the UK or the EU has. We have just seen Brexit happen, and the North is now in a position in which we have fewer rights than we had when we were part of the EU.

I had a conversation earlier today with individuals about the new regulations for Civil Service posts. The British Government regard everyone in the North as British by virtue of birth. Irish people from the North, such as me, are able to work for the Civil Service because they are regarded as British. If I were to renounce that right, that would remove my right to work for the Civil Service.

I will follow on from the hypothetical situation in your healthcare example. Yes, the NHS is a brilliant service, of which we probably all have availed ourselves; I know that I have. There are people who, in legislation, have particular healthcare rights that they are not able to access, such as abortion rights for women. The law changed on that last year, but we still do not have the proper services implemented across our trusts. Trans individuals cannot access services because of an issue with the only clinic in the North, the Brackenburn Clinic.

You presented the hypothetical situation of whether somebody could be sued because people have not been able to access a particular service during the COVID pandemic. Let me focus on that. If we had healthcare as an established right, would the situation be that, not without proper rationale, the health service could be sued? We have a Health Minister who is returning money in underspend when we have had a year-long pandemic, during which travellers have been allowed on to the island; we have seen elderly patients returned from hospitals to care homes; and we have had a lot of deaths due to the pandemic. Would having healthcare in a bill of rights allow some accountability for that?

I do not believe that healthcare should be included in a bill of rights. It is something that, the Human Rights Commission suggested, would be subject to progressive realisation, and that is a concept that we do not have in our legal system here. It would therefore be very new if anybody were to bring such issues to court, and the outcome would be wholly unpredictable.

The issues that you referred to around abortion and trans rights are resource issues. Abortion is now part of the law of the land. It is up to people like you in the Assembly and the parties in the Executive to provide those services.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): There are services, but they have been implemented independently by clinicians in the trusts. It is the Health Minister's responsibility to put in place a framework for them. It is not a resource issue but a political decision by the Minister that has prevented implementation thus far.

You are much better informed than I am on these matters, and I defer to you on that. We know that it is the law of the land now, as introduced by Stella Creasy's Bill, and I am also reasonably certain that the Assembly, if left to itself, would have still been debating the issue. It is emotive, and, if you are talking in terms of rights, you are talking in terms of a woman's right to choice and you also have the opposite argument about the rights of the unborn child. Rights will always be in conflict with each other.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Thank you very much. I will now pass to my Deputy Chair, Mike Nesbitt.

Mr Nesbitt: Chair, thank you very much. Lady Trimble, good afternoon, and thank you for engaging. Before we begin, I will put something on record. The Chair has given an analysis of previous government arrangements for Northern Ireland: I do not think that that analysis will be shared by every member of the Committee.

Lady Trimble, you have a lot of publications behind you, but I assume that this one, the 2008 advice issued by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission to the Secretary of State, is not necessarily — oh, it is.

This one?

Mr Nesbitt: Snap. Yes. Am I right in assuming that, in one sense, you think that it went far too far but that, in another important sense, it did not go far enough and, in fact, did not even get off the starting line in looking at issues with regard to mutual respect and parity of esteem?

Yes, Mike, I think that you have summed up my view quite well. In a sense, the discussion was like a juggernaut that was already well down the road when I joined the commission. It was well through its discussions and took the report from the bill of rights forum — have I even got that title right? As I get older, I sometimes forget the names of things. The commission was on a steamroller. I thought that there were things around victims in particular, and I know that you have a particular interest in victims' issues, as did I when I was a member of the memorial, you know, the — oh dear, I have forgotten the name of it.

Mr Nesbitt: The Northern Ireland Memorial Fund.

The Northern Ireland Memorial Fund. Thank you for that. We did a lot of work with victims at that time. It was good work, and it was what led to the Victims' Commission. That was not done with a view to saying that there was a right to that. It was the right thing to do, and victims needed to be acknowledged in the context of our coming out of those bitter 30 years of conflict. Those are the issues that I thought the Human Rights Commission should have been discussing, and we did not really. They were extremely difficult issues, and I cannot say whether we would have come up with any firm proposal, but we did not really get to the point of discussing them.

Mr Nesbitt: I think that you and Pat Hume did tremendous work with the memorial fund, by the way.

I think that you referenced the fact that Professor Colin Harvey said that we should go back and revisit that 2008 advice document, and I think that Brian Gormally of the Committee on the Administration of Justice also said that we should just lift it. It was rejected by you, and it was rejected by the Northern Ireland Office, so that takes me to the point where we ask ourselves whether something is better than nothing. Do we want the all-singing, all-dancing outcome, as that document has been referred to as being, or should we say that politics is the art of the possible and we should cut a deal on what we can agree on?

That is what politics is all about. It has always been about trying to get something and trying to get what is achievable. That all-singing, all-dancing bill of rights was not achievable back in 2008, and I do not think that it would be achievable now. I do not think that it would be the right thing for Northern Ireland, but there may be something there that you could get if you were to work and puzzle at it for — I do not know long, but for however much longer your Committee is going to sit.

The Committee has certainly heard from a really wide range of people, and I applaud the Committee for having that range of experts. It is almost more than I had heard from when I was a member of the Human Rights Commission. Some of the names are exactly the same; Brian Gormally and Colin Harvey were involved with the Human Rights Commission, and I recognise the names of a number of others from those days, who have given evidence to the Committee and who we worked with then. The number of judicial witnesses that you have had has been quite impressive.

Mr Nesbitt: Sorry, just to be clear, Lady Trimble, are you saying that the Committee should not discard the 2008 advice as there may be good stuff in it?

Well, I am not saying that absolutely, but you can look at it. There may be some things there that are relevant, but, as a whole, it is far too much. With 80 recommendations, Northern Ireland would become the human rights capital of the world. We would have people coming here simply to use our new human rights legislation. It would be awful. I think that there may be a very small number of things, and I am not going to specify what they would be as I would need to look at it again and to put my thinking cap on. However, things around victims, parading and the issues that divided us during the conflict are the sorts of things that I think we should be looking at.

Mr Nesbitt: That answers my next question, which would have been, "What could you live with?" I think that you have just defined it.

Yes, I think so.

Mr Nesbitt: As my final question to you, you talked about judges potentially making judgement calls between various budget allocations, but it is my recollection that anybody whom we have spoken to, including judicial figures and academics in the judicial sphere, have said that that is absolutely something that judges would not say was judicable. Emma talked about Health handing money back, but I think that that could only be judicable if the reason for handing it back was to prevent the money from spent on a section of society in a way that might be deemed sectarian.

Yes. I do not think that judges want to make the sorts of decisions that we have been talking about. I do not think that they want to decide between funding streams on where money should be going. However, they might be faced with having to make those sorts of decisions. A judge can only decide on the facts of a case that are presented to him or her. That is going to be — I referred to this in my written presentation — your well-funded NGOs or individuals who choose which cases to bring, and they will be beating their own drums. That takes decision-making further away from the political process and it means that — the judges cannot just decide, "Yes, Health should have one pot of money and housing should have another pot of money". They will be deciding on the particular facts that come before them, and it may lead to results that you do not want.

Mr Nesbitt: Yes. Just to finish off on that point, it is my impression that the judge likes to look at the facts as they are presented, rather than at the opinions as they are presented. You could find that an Executive Minister was defending a decision because it was their opinion that this was the best thing to do, rather than based on the sorts of facts that judges are more comfortable with.

Yes.

Mr Nesbitt: Lady Trimble, thank you very much.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Thank you, Lady Trimble, for your presentation and, indeed, for your written evidence. On the last point, there is a lot of speculation about the role of the judiciary, but it should be the place of last resort. You can look at what was in the Good Friday Agreement, and an anti-poverty strategy is mentioned in section 28E of the NI Act. That was denied for a long time, which resulted in a judicial review. That judicial review, even the lead hearing, was quite specific and detailed. It took into consideration things that should have happened, and, once it was established that they did not happen, leave was granted.

You said that you are not prepared to be specific about what you would keep from the 2008 report, although you went on to mention things like victims and parading. You did not provide or offer a minority report. You had a note of dissent. That is correct, is it not?

That is correct. Sorry, maybe you had not finished.

Ms Ní Chuilín: You are OK.

That issue was hugely controversial at the time. I wanted to put in a minority report, and I was prevented from doing so. There was a very heated meeting of the Human Rights Commission, and the other person who dissented was your former colleague Jonathan Bell. I remember a meeting when he and I were segregated from the rest of the commission when matters became extremely heated, so the fact that I did not put in a minority report was not my choice. That was the chief commissioner's decision.

Ms Ní Chuilín: OK. I remember 2008, and I remember that, the day before the report was due to be launched, you and Jonathan had your own press conference. A lot of this stuff is water under the bridge, as they say.

In your paper, you note your concerns about moving decision-making from the legislature to the judiciary. I accept that. Well, I do not accept it; I am trying to understand it, because, even if legislation is made and, for example, is blocked at the Executive, which has happened, the result is going to court. That is what happens. I was at one of those judicial review hearings, and there was quite an interrogation of why the case went to court in the first place. I do not think that anybody is now saying that legislation needs to be made by the judiciary; that is what the Assembly is for. In your view, what role would the court have where there have been breaches of rights or a perception of a breach of rights? You mentioned healthcare. While it is not there, it is topical, but the issue is that if, for example — Mike mentioned this — there is a bill of rights with a suite of protections written in law for everyone, surely that is a good thing regardless.

There is quite a lot in what you have asked me.

Ms Ní Chuilín: There is. Sorry, Lady Trimble. I rambled on.

That is all right. I am not arguing that judges should not have a role in deciding rights; they have. The point of a bill of rights is that an individual whose rights have been infringed or who thinks that their rights have been infringed should go to court, have their day in court and have a judge decide. I am not arguing that that should not be the case; I am arguing that there are certain rights that it is not appropriate for judges to decide on.

Those are what we called the "socio-economic rights" that the Human Rights Commission wanted to introduce and that concept of progressive realisation. That was completely new for human rights law, certainly in Europe. I think that the concept originated in South Africa, which is quite a long way away. We do not have it in our legal system nor is it anywhere in Europe, to the best of my knowledge, unless something has changed very much since the days when I was fully up to speed with those matters. However, I do not think that it has changed.

I am not arguing that judges should not have a role; of course, they should have a role, and they do have a role. I am not arguing that that should be changed at all. What I am asking is whether it is your desire to take decision-making around the allocation of resources, because resources are never going to be infinite, and put that in the hands of the judiciary at the behest of whoever chooses to bring a case to them. That is what I am arguing. I hope that that answers your question. Sorry, I know that you had another point, but I have lost it.

Ms Ní Chuilín: You said that there was a role for the judiciary, and I just wanted to clarify what that role was. I still do not hear you arguing against having a bill of rights. It may not have been the bill of rights process that you were involved in, but the point that Mike and others have made is that, if a bill of rights is a suite of protections in law that is enjoyed by all citizens, there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of in that.

I am not arguing against a bill of rights. We have a bill of rights in the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. We have those existing rights. I am not arguing that anybody should take any of those away. What you are tasked to look at is whether to add anything to those rights. I am not against an addition, but you have to think very carefully about what you should add to that. The Human Rights Commission did not come up with the right answer. Obviously, the politicians, way back in 1998, when they were signing the Belfast Agreement, did not come up with an answer. They kicked it into touch and asked the Human Rights Commission to look at the problem. Therefore, there may be something around issues such as victims and parading — those are the two that come most to my mind — but I have no advice for you as to the way in which you should form or phrase those rights. I just do not know how you would do it.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I appreciate that. Victims have had to go to court in order to try to get some resolution. There is a body to look at parades and protests.

I will finish with this point: the only thing, Lady Trimble, is that I found it astounding that the whole commission was in favour of a bill of rights, apart from two who dissented, and the British Secretary of State then took up the mantle. In fact, the minority had more power than the majority. The difficulty is that we do not want that to happen again. That is the position. If anything, we are here to learn lessons from the past but also to see what we can do that will, hopefully — I am not convinced yet — see the support of every political party across the board, because rights for one are rights for all. Thank you, Lady Trimble. I appreciate your time, the work that you have done and your presentation.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Christopher, I think that you were looking to come in.

Mr Stalford: Yes, just on that last point. It was not just the two commissioners who dissented: it was two commissioners, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Ulster Unionist Party and, I think, the Alliance Party, to about two thirds of that which was produced by the Bill of Rights Forum. I served on the Bill of Rights Forum during that period. I remember going through it thinking to myself, "What on earth have I done to offend someone that I have been sent for?". It was an interminable process.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Christopher,

might have felt the same about you. I believe that you were

OK.

Mr Stalford: They were all [Inaudible.]

My first question is about that, because, Lady Trimble, you participated in the process. What I have seen emerging, today especially, is a broad philosophical difference in approach, which I would characterise as a maximalist approach and a more restrained approach. Can you talk to how those differences effectively scuppered previous attempts to produce a bill of rights?

Yes, Christopher. You have hit the nail on the head: that was what we faced in the Human Rights Commission. There were the maximalists, who wanted the all-singing, all-dancing, brave new world type of progressive realisation of socio-economic rights — it was going to be a paradise for human rights activists — and then there was Jonathan and I, who wanted a little bit more reality and a little more common sense to prevail. Most of the people who presented to the commission were human right activists who wanted the maximalist approach, and that was the approach that the majority chose to follow. We had an extremely heavy workload. There was meeting after meeting and paper after paper. It was the most difficult body that I have ever served on, and I have been on a few in my time and have had some difficult meetings. I was not able to persuade others on the commission that my view should prevail. Therefore, we just had to disagree at the end of the day. As I said to Carál, there were some very stormy meetings at the tail end, and it was not an easy time. She probably encountered similar sorts of discussions in the Bill of Rights Forum.

Mr Stalford: Yes, I would characterise the problem as, effectively, people who could not obtain their agenda through the ballot box abusing the process to try to use it almost as a Trojan horse to deliver their policy preferences. That is why the thing fell apart, and it is why any future attempt at that will result in the thing falling apart.

The role of religion in society has obviously changed. Fifty years ago, the majority of people were, certainly nominally, members of a Church or attended a place of worship. That is no longer the case, and religion is a minority pursuit. On the protection of religious freedom, how do you see the bill of rights process playing out? Do you think that we have sufficient protection in current legislation and that there is therefore no need to legislate for that through a bill of rights?

You have rather put me on the spot there, because I cannot remember what it says in the European Convention about religious freedoms. Clearly, I am of the view that religious freedom is pretty important. Without doing a little bit of research on the issue, I cannot say whether it is protected. I suspect that it is in the European Convention somewhere. It is an important issue. Freedom to pursue your religious beliefs, whatever they may be, is important. However, I am not sure that that is under threat at the moment.

Mr Stalford: No. Thank you.

Chair, on a point of housekeeping, on 22 January, I received an answer from the Minister of Health to my question about how many terminations had been carried out in Northern Ireland since 31 March 2020 to the end of the year: the figure is 1,091. You might not think that that is enough, but I certainly do.

Goodness.

Mr Stalford: Thank you.

Mr Nesbitt: We cannot hear you, Chair.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Oh, sorry. I thought that there was a lag in my stream, but I think that I was still muted.

I am just checking that nobody else wants in. I have not had any indications. Michelle is not wanting to come in and neither is Mark. OK. That is us.

Thank you very much, Lady Trimble, for your presentation and for all your answers. We will let you take your ease. Thanks again for joining us this afternoon.

Thank you very much for having me. It has been a pleasure. I shall go and have a cup of tea.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Well earned.

Thank you. Goodbye.

The Chairperson (Ms Sheerin): Slán.