Equality Commission for Northern Ireland

I think that they are struggling to respond to it meaningfully.

I mean, interestingly, another thing that came up in the debate yesterday was that sponsor of the bill said, kind of suggested that the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland had sort of signed off on his bill as being equality and human rights law compliant, and they rushed out a statement during the debate saying, actually, we haven't done that assessment because it's not our job to do it at this stage.

So, you know, the sponsors of this bill, supporters of this bill, know they've got a problem.

I think the questions are unanswerable.

We don't have that either.

There's an Equality Commission and a Human Rights Commission who were extremely important in Brexit.

You don't get human rights parts of the Windsor Framework or Northern Ireland Protocol without those bodies.

But also, just a shout out to the amazing grassroots human rights organisations in Northern Ireland who are incredible at their jobs, like bringing Michelle Barnier along the border to explain to them how your lived experience was going to be affected by this.

scales, yep.

which basically just accepts that rather than saying we have a neat hierarchy that's vertical in nature, what we actually have is at every level they're sort of like branching out in different types of shapes with civil service actors coming in, helping define some of these rules.

So as Aoife mentioned, the Equality Commission and the Human Rights Commission intervening to say, hey, the Windsor Framework needs to acknowledge how life works on the island of Ireland.

We can't have different rules applying in the Republic and in Northern Ireland when it comes to human rights.

There was just a case in the UK of a trans man.

who, trying to follow the new Equality Commission guidelines in the UK about who gets to use which toilet, he was using the women's toilet.

But because he looks unambiguously male, it made the women there uncomfortable.

And there was a ruling that said he is not allowed to use either toilet at work.