Ms Melanie Pine is the first Director of Equality Investigations, a job which replaces and expands the investigative role of the equality officers who existed under the old Employment Equality Act.
Not only will she be concerned with investigating allegations of discrimination in employment on the nine grounds outlined in the legislation, she will also be able to investigate alleged discrimination in services when the Equal Status Bill comes into force.
So if, for example, a member of a racial minority feels he or she has been refused a drink in a bar on racial grounds, or a person in a wheelchair cannot enter a theatre, they can go to the Equality Authority for advice and then seek redress from Ms Pine's office.
It will be in the same building as the Equality Authority, although it will have a separate entrance. It opens today with a skeleton staff, to be built on in the coming months.
The emphasis will be on simple procedures and the speedy processing of claims, according to Ms Pine. Although the director will have an in-house legal adviser and the case-law it establishes will set legal precedent, it is intended to be as non-legalistic as possible.
The director will have the power to order compensation and to require people to take specific actions, or desist from an action found to be discriminatory.
Ms Pine brings a wide range of experience to the job. In 20 years in the Civil Service she has worked mainly in the employment area and was press officer to Mr Bertie Ahern when he was minister for labour. In 1991 she went to the Irish Embassy in Britain.
She returned to the Department of Enterprise and Employment in Dublin in 1995, where she co-wrote `Growing and Sharing our Employment, a labour market strategy paper, and has been in the Department of Health and Children since 1997. She was chairwoman of the Dublin Well Woman Centres from 1995 to 1997.