Joint Committee on Disability Matters debate -
Wednesday, 25 Sep 2024

Apologies have been received from Senator Mary Seery Kearney and Deputy Seán Canney.

The purpose of today's meeting is to discuss increased employment participation for persons with disabilities. On behalf of the committee, I sincerely welcome representatives from the Disabled Persons' Organisation Network: Ms Lianne Quigley, chairperson of the Irish Deaf Society; and Mr. John Sherwin, chief executive officer of the Irish Deaf Society.

Before we begin, there is a note on privilege. Witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as defamatory. Therefore, if witnesses' statements are potentially defamatory and they are directed to discontinue their remarks, it is imperative that they do so.

Members are reminded of the same parliamentary practice that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against any person or entity outside of the House in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

I also remind members of the constitutional requirement that members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex to participate in public meetings. If members are participating remotely, I ask them to indicate that they are within the grounds of Leinster House.

Without further ado, I call Ms Quigley to make her opening statement.

The DPO Network welcomes the opportunity to be here today. We are an alliance of five DPOs with a shared goal to fully implement the UNCRPD. Our members are AsIAm - Ireland's national autism advocacy organisation; Disabled Women Ireland; Independent Living Movement Ireland; the Irish Deaf Society; and the National Platform of Self Advocates. The DPO Network is committed to the human rights and social model of disability which says that the exclusion, inequality and discrimination disabled people experience is not the consequence of our impairments but a result of the economic, cultural, social and political forces in society.

As a network, we collectively recognise that the pathway to equality of access, equality of opportunity and equity of outcomes for disabled people in employment depends on many factors over our life course. It is not just about applying for a job. Our collective experience relates to expectations and outcomes in education. It is about schools, teachers, guidance counsellors, education and training providers, third-level institutions and employers. Our success in attaining and progressing in employment relates to how we access mainstream employment and their expectations and capacity to support disabled people.

If a disabled person manages to secure employment, he or she does not have the same promotion or career advancement opportunities, and anecdotal evidence suggests he or she often does not have the same ability to negotiate salary payments commensurate with length of service or skill development. It is about targeted employment supports that are directed to us to meet our needs. It is about specific supports, such as ISL and personal assistance. It is about us having up-to-date information on what employment supports disabled people can access, from navigating income thresholds and job interviews, to information about training and reasonable accommodation supports for disabled people who are employed being made available via a variety of formats. In 2023, the European Disability Forum found that the average rate of employment for people with disabilities in the EU is 51%. However, in Ireland, the rate is just 32.6% - the joint worst in Europe.

Whilst there are many factors that need to be addressed to improve the rates of employment of disabled people in Ireland, some specific measures need to be prioritised. Special schools do not hold high expectations of disabled people. We need to remove the term "special" from education and the barriers caused by the term "special needs". Schools are not just about learning for academic qualifications. It is where we can build friendships and begin our journey to feeling part of our communities. Too often parents choose schools based on additional resources or under the mistaken perception that there will more acceptance of disabled children when they go to a special school.

Career guidance is vital for everyone to set goals about their future lives. Guidance for disabled students also needs to be expectation-focused. Guidance counsellors need to motivate disabled people. Guidance should help us explore our strengths, what suits us, and what supports we will need in study, exam or in class to achieve that. It must be a multi-pronged approach which links the aspirations of disabled students with the supports they need to achieve their goals, and which links with disabled people through local DPOs to build confidence and shift expectations.

Employers need support to ensure their workplace culture and practice is supportive and inclusive. This can and should be done by disabled people and resourced through an autonomous disability employment DPO who can effectively and authentically engage with employers. This DPO should provide an expert-by-experience collective whom employers can approach about issues they do not want to raise directly with employees, as well as providing disability equality training. This employment DPO would develop strategic engagement on this issue of professional training and development of HR staff, such as with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, to embed disability equality in CPD for HR staff.

This DPO should become the “go to” for employers and employer bodies such as ISME, IBEC, the Small Firms Association and so on, as part of a long-term commitment to developing inclusive recruitment policies and practices to ensure increased employment opportunities for disabled people.

There is very little focus on the role of self-employed disabled people and, consequently, few, if any, tailored supports are available to them. Some people who are self-employed may later acquire an impairment and may lack information or real supports to keep managing their business. Any supports available to employers to support the employment of disabled people are not available to disabled people who are looking to set up their own businesses or who are self-employed. Disabled people who are self-employed cannot apply for grants or schemes that are available to companies that employ disabled people, such as the workplace adaptation grant. Self-employed disabled people should also have access to these supports. Start-up costs for disabled entrepreneurs need to be addressed by its own targeted funding stream. Many disabled people who have skills and ambitions to set up and run their own business do not have the financial resources to do so.

Mainstream employment programmes need to be inclusive and target disabled people, and not be something that is provided to disabled people as a token gesture. It is vitally important there is a local link in the community. Many disabled people have given negative feedback about their experiences of having training and employment provided to them. Some have had positive experiences, but overall their performance expectations are low because the medical model is still focused on treating them as impaired. They are not encouraged to do what they want to do.

Disabled people are very concerned about the overall role in their employment. Millions are spent but yet very little is led by organisations for disabled people. We have not see a programme like this. This is something vital that is missing for disabled people. There should be an opportunity to speak to us about what programmes we would like. For example, there should be a meaningful engagement or co-creation of programmes, where we develop access-to-work schemes, with ISL interpreters in the workplace. This process of support is complicated and not clearly understood. The procedure for booking or having interpreters is not clear. The option for deaf people to choose what they want to have in the workplace is not provided for. It is vital that DPOs are included in the process of assessing what people with disabilities need in the workplace. What is in place now is simply not enough. We continue to want to see and to build supports for disabled people in employment. This needs to be a commercial entity. The body needs to have access to funds and supports in relation to staff, management, costs and so on. This entity would have the authority to engage with employers and HR structures and would be managed by, and employ, disabled people. We need to have a DPO employment agency with clear targets that is designed and controlled by us, has high expectations for us and meets our needs.

I thank Ms Quigley for her opening statement. It goes without saying that we all share the same goal of fully implementing the UNCRPD. According to the European Disability Forum report, the average rate of employment in the EU for people with disabilities is 51% while in Ireland it is only 32.6%. This is the joint lowest figure in Europe. Full-time employment for women with a disability is only 15%, which is really worrying. How can this gap be closed, particularly when it comes to the figure for women? Considering all the problems women with disabilities encounter, I am wondering how we can close that gap.

I am not sure about the issue of people working from home. Given that many people now work from home, are there a lot of people with disabilities who work from home? I am not sure of the figures because a lot of technological assistance would be needed. I am curious where we are with that.

We are told employers are given supports to take on people with disabilities, but self-employed people do not get supports. What must be included in the new national disability strategy and comprehensive employment strategy to enable self-employment pathways for people with disabilities? This is very important. Article 27 of the UNCRPD refers to the right of people with disabilities to work. What are the gaps and what are we missing in delivering that?

There is also the issue of people with disabilities having a fear of losing their benefits. There is a high rate of early school leaving and what appears to be a lower level of educational attainment. I do not know we are going to close a lot of these gaps.

Those are very good questions. I do not think we have all the answers. We are working with the Department of equality at the moment to co-create the national disability strategy, of which employment is a very important aspect. Our opening statement refers to the difficulties faced by disabled people and deaf people regarding introduction to self-employment. This starts with education and confidence building. In our opening statement, we edited out elements about raising the expectations of parents of disabled children and of disabled people themselves and the role of DPOs in society. We have a career project for deaf people and we had to develop awareness within the deaf community of the word "career" because people only understood "job" and "career" was a foreign concept to them. There is a lot of work to be done.

Disabled people face a glass ceiling in terms of jobs and advancing in jobs. There is no really meaningful engagement with DPOs about this, or data that we can work from. We can consult the census data and get disaggregated data for particular data points related to this but there needs to be a much higher level of engagement with us in order that we can try to solve these problems. One of the points we talk about here is funding and supports for disabled people working from home and entering into self-employment.

A huge confidence-building and capacity-building exercise needs to happen there as well. We have no doubt that disabled people and deaf people can be self-employed, work from home, run commercial entities and achieve things. The majority of our staff in the Irish Deaf Society are deaf. All our senior managers are deaf. The majority of our board are deaf. Since the Covid pandemic, our staff have been working in a hybrid fashion, from home and in the office, which allows us to have more staff than we can fit into our office as we grow and expand. There are no available figures of which I am aware, however, on working from home or self-employment for disabled people. We would certainly like to see those figures.

I will round that point off with information on our own experience in the Irish Deaf Society. We set up home offices for our staff so they could work on work-related computers and use equipment both at home and in the office seamlessly. That arrangement has continued since the pandemic has finished, and very successfully so, I might add. Our staff are able to take on their personal goals. They are able to report on achieving those goals. We have high expectations of our staff, and disabled people and deaf people can thrive under those circumstances.

As an advocacy and rights organisation, of course, we are very proactive in making sure all of the equipment and supports are available. Often, we find it is a bit of a fight. Deaf people who report to us struggle to get supports. Earlier this year, we published a small piece of research funded by IHREC on barriers for deaf people in employment. They have significant problems and much of this has to do with culture and attitudes in their employers’ organisations. Not all the problems we seek to fix require a budget; much of this is about awareness raising and attitudes. We believe this is really important.

The witnesses are all very welcome. They are here to talk to us about a topic to which the State needs to find a much more impactful way of responding than we have managed to date. I was the Minister for enterprise until relatively recently. In the build-up to last year's budget, we had a number of meetings with the Department of Social Protection and the Department of equality to discuss how we could try to change the pretty awful performance in Ireland in terms of finding a way to support people with a disability and help them into the workforce, if that is where they want to be. There are many interesting pilot projects around the country, many of which are driven by fantastic organisations, some of which I know very well. The more general policy and leadership, however, must come from the State and its infrastructure.

I am interested to get the views of the representatives on how they perceive the new work and access supports. A big effort has been made by the Department of Social Protection to change and adapt the level of support and the areas it targets with support, including for self-employed people, in terms of qualification, as well as to change the thresholds and amount of money available to help adapt the workplace, get specialist support to help people and hire specialist support or staff on an annual basis. There is a significant amount grant aid now available for that.

I agree that this is not just about money. It is also about attitudes and embedded perceptions people have that need to change, including in the area of education. I am glad the witnesses raised the education issue. There is a need to ensure we raise the expectation and opportunity for people who have a disability, and not just at primary and secondary school levels. We must help build confidence in people to do so. We must also do this in the area of further education, where there are several projects with which I am sure the representatives will be familiar. Young adults with a disability are training under programmes that need to be adapted to suit their approach to learning or the way they learn. Many courses, such as FETAC levels 3 or 4 courses and qualifications, are not being adapted in the way that is required to accommodate a different way or pace of learning. There is a need for an open mind in that area.

To be fair to the Departments that are looking at this area, however, there is now a genuine attempt to improve supports and services. Many people have been deeply frustrated by barriers to entering the workforce. I do not think budgets and money are the barrier. I am a little frustrated to hear the representatives say that people with a disability have not been consulted enough. If they are saying that, then clearly it is true and we need to respond to it. Obviously, there will be an opportunity in next week's budget for the Government to allocate more resources to this area.

If we look at employment in Ireland, on virtually every metric we are in the top five or ten countries in the world in terms of income levels, social welfare supports and training. We then have this reality that when it comes to people with disabilities we are nowhere near the top. In fact, we are at the bottom. The Government is very conscious of that. It clearly needs to consult more with organisations such as those present to make sure that when we target additional resources, we target them in the right place. We also need to change attitudes within families and across society more generally. We must demand a changing workplace that is much friendlier to people who have a disability, who want to work and can make a very significant contribution more broadly to the economy by being part of the workforce, as many are already doing.

This is a useful opportunity for us to hear what the representatives have to say in order that we can try to respond both next week and beyond. As I say, one of the challenges here is that a number of different Departments are responsible in this area. The Department of enterprise has a responsibility, as do the Departments of Social Protection, community, equality and Education. In my experience, one of the challenges in politics is that when an issue spans three, four or five Departments, things often get missed because of the siloed way in which State organisations and Government respond. That is clearly something we have to change. I thank the representatives for taking the time to be with us. I hope we will learn something from it.

I thank the Deputy and agree with all the points he made. I would like to give additional feedback regarding the plans behind the areas of work and access.

I am deaf. I found the paperwork and the application process very frustrating. People see that I am deaf, but the process of having to fill in forms to make an application is complicated. As was said, there has not been enough consultation and transparency on the form-filling and application process. It is all still very vague. Several different Departments are involved, which is frustrating. The DPO Network had a meeting with the Department of equality on the national strategic plan and we talked about the crossover between Departments in the area of disability. Some kind of breakthrough is needed in order to create one central point - almost a one-stop shop - where all the Departments can cross over to avoid separating everything out. The Department of Social Protection did not consult the disability groups. Any policies, strategic plans or anything else being decided upon needs to have meaningful consultation with disability organisations. That is more impactful. I work with the work and access scheme. In the application process when looking for an interpreter, people have to pick one name. People are asked to select the name of an interpreter, but there are several different interpreters. That is just one example of a barrier, that there is only room for one name. Attitudes also need to change and education on disability and access helps that. It would make a big difference

Part of the problem is that many services delivered to disabled people and deaf people are delivered from a welfare perspective, based on a medical model, rather than from a rights perspective. This results in a paternalistic provision of services with an assumption that people will try to take advantage of the system. The work and access scheme allows for 24 hours per year interpretation time for a deaf person in the workplace. It could be extremely simple, whereby a workplace or deaf person applies for the scheme, it is awarded and at the end of the year they submit 24 hours worth of invoices. Instead, as Ms Quigley said, there is only room for the name of one interpreter. I do not know whether any of the members have ever booked an interpreter, but there are 140 of them in the country. The deaf population in Finland requires 500 to satisfy services. The demand is quite high. People take whatever interpreter they can get. They cannot be pre-booked.

With respect, when the Deputy says he is disappointed with the results because Departments and State services are trying to improve services, we can absolutely see that, but they are not trying to improve them through meaningful engagement and co-creation. We can see why these programmes are not working and why the results are bad. It is because we are not involved in the services about us. The work and access scheme is one example. There was a consultation at the start of the development of the scheme and then the scheme was delivered and it is not right. We then have to go about campaigning to change the scheme. If there had been a process of co-creation, where we were involved throughout the process of developing the scheme, it would have had a much better chance of being correct. We talk about the many pilots around the country that are producing exciting results or doing interesting things, but what happens with the pilots? We have had several pilots for services in the deaf community, including an on-demand interpreting app, but following the pilot nothing happened.

As an example of something going right and something going wrong, the DPO Network has engaged with the Department of equality in co-creating the new national disability strategy and it is going well. We are working through problems and providing good feedback. Following the collapse of the pilot for the on-demand app in February, we approached the Department of Social Protection for a meeting about how to improve the spirit of meaningful engagement between DPOs and the Department. Since February, I have continued to email and ask the Department for a meeting on that subject, but it has not been able to make time to reply to those emails.

It is true that there is genuine interest in improving services, but the realisation does not seem to be there that without meaningful engagement and co-creation, some of the time and some of the budget are being spent on going in the wrong direction. The level of frustration about that results in, for example, the recent paper from Independent Living Movement Ireland, ILMI, on how disability budgets are managed and looking for disabled people to control and manage those budgets. Without our input, those budgets are not being spent as effectively as they could be. I am afraid there is engagement but much of it is still tokenistic. We require a much better attitude across government to co-creation to get this right for everyone's benefit.

As I said, in Finland 500 interpreters service the same population. We were recently awarded IHREC funding to study barriers to studying to be an ISL interpreter, graduating successfully, entering the workforce and staying in the workforce. Many interpreters currently work part time. There are some short-term fixes but we need a medium- and long-term strategy as well. All the members of the DPO Network would accept that instant solutions to problems do not happen. Our frustrations relate to developing agreed plans about how to solve them. We can be co-creators of those plans. We have skin in the game and when it goes wrong, it would go wrong for us together. We hope that as the State ramps up engagement, particularly with the deaf community - in answer to the Deputy's question about ISL interpreters - when they cannot be booked, representatives of public bodies will join us in our call to try to improve the situation, rather than see it as a reason that engagement cannot take place.

I received an email today from a parent of a young lad who is in college and is deaf. Sometimes an ISL interpreter is available but sometimes there is none. When no interpreter is available, he has a note taker and that takes away his independence. I do not know whether the problem is that the college fails to make the effort to book all the time or whether it cannot get an ISL interpreter. One of her suggestions, which is something I had been following up but getting nowhere on, is to ask why ISL is not a subject in schools. It has been a recognised language since 2017. I kept being passed from the Department of Education to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, but I never got a straight answer. Someone said something else had to happen first and so forth. It should definitely be considered. Mr. Sherwin indicated, in his example of the work and access scheme, that there is a shortage of ISL interpreters. He also indicated that the scheme was not co-created and there was no proper engagement, which is a direct contravention of the UNCRPD. Departments are still not listening.

The Department of Social Protection has been before the committee and we talked about the fact that it should be talking to DPOs. We had the example of the Green Paper on Disability Reform on which no prior engagement took place. It needs to happen so that things can be formed properly from the beginning and do not have to be changed.

The witnesses said that inclusive education is important and I agree with them. It is under-resourced, however. We need buy-in from parents to send their children to mainstream schools which have a special class or autism class attached. Many parents I know will not do so, however, because there are not enough properly trained staff in the autism or special classes. One parent told me that her son regressed in the autism class.

She then enrolled him in a special school but it was not easy to get him in there. We need to get buy-in from parents, which we will not have until it is properly resourced. We need to see a lot more resources going into mainstream schools to support students with disabilities or additional needs going to those schools and not choosing to go to a special school. There is no career guidance in special schools. Has this been addressed?

We do have career guidance in the school but it is not specifically targeted towards employment and goals for careers. We need specialised career guidance counsellors. As Mr. Sherwin said, there are not enough ISL interpreters. There is no 24-hour emergency interpreting service available if a deaf person has to go to hospital. It boils down to an agency making contact with an interpreter and hoping somebody will answer the phone in the middle of the night. In the north west of Ireland there are very few interpreters. It is a high-risk area for deaf people to live if they have an emergency. With regard to education and employment, everything is impacted by the number of available interpreters. I would like to see more investment in ISL interpreter career engagement and advancement and employed positions.

How do we access interpreters with regard to self-employment? The Houses of the Oireachtas has employed interpreters. There are not enough employed in-house interpreters in other institutions or colleges. Examples of where they are include Trinity College and DCU. An example was given of a student who does not have access to an interpreter every day. This is because the college does not have the resources or has limited availability of interpreters in the particular area. As Mr. Sherwin said, in Finland the population of deaf people is similar to here but there is a higher number of interpreters. There needs to be more investment in interpreter training and in retaining interpreters in the career.

I will make a comment on ISL in schools. All of us hearing people grew up through primary and post-primary education in which we received an English language class every day. Deaf children do not receive ISL classes. They do not receive tuition in other subjects through their own language. There is an educational barrier that further impacts employment and the notion of self-employment at a later age.

We accept there are many problems that need to be addressed, and we are all very much on a journey to try to address them, but I would like to focus on a core problem that we can solve today, which is speaking to us about services for us. Meaningful engagement, although it will not solve everything immediately, would allow us to see we are working together to solve things together. There needs to be transparency and engagement on funding allocations and how disability budgets are spent. We need to be involved in these decisions and not just told what they are. This is something we would like to focus on.

There are fewer DPOs in Ireland than there should be and we hope there will be more and more as disabled people are empowered to form their own organisations. If we are to engage we need funding to do so. Often we sit at meeting tables where the disabled person is the only unpaid person there, perhaps in a voluntary capacity. The Irish Deaf Society is a company which has paid employees but many of our members and other disabled people appear in a voluntary capacity. They are expected to give critical analysis and feedback to a professional cohort of policy developers on the same level. We would like to see some funding for DPOs to provide this type of feedback. There is no funding for this today. None of our DPOs are funded to provide meaningful engagement. We need capacity and capability, improvements and delivery programmes. Help us to help you, and we can all help each other to progress on achieving meaningful and effective service delivery. Gradually, over time, we will solve these problems together.

The point Mr. Sherwin has made has been made by many people who have come before the committee. They are often the only unpaid person in the room but they are the experts in the room. Some smaller DPOs that have been formed are told to get charitable status and then they can apply for various forms of funding. They say they are not charities but disabled people advocating for themselves. We need to move away from the charitable model. The Minister had promised to put together a register of DPOs but this still has not happened. Progress on this is very slow. It is something that we hope to see happen. Various public bodies and Departments will then know exactly with whom they should be engaging, depending on the nature of the policy or whatever they are doing, and they can engage with the appropriate DPO.

I was at an IHREC orientation event today related to our funding for interpreters. We spoke about research fatigue, disabled people and deaf people who are involved in research. A lot of people do not see the point of getting involved in advocacy, policy work and research because they do not see the results happening. If there were a growing culture of meaningful engagement, and we could see we were working with the State to make developments, the results may not happen as quickly as we would like but there would be an incentive for people to get involved. Many disabled people and deaf people who have strong voices, clarity of thought and advice on strategy on all of this have difficulty with being involved.

I thank the witnesses for coming before the committee. I apologise for being in and out because there have been votes in the Seanad. I read the statements. This is an area in which I am very much interested. Mr. Sherwin spoke earlier about there being an attitude in many Departments that supports for people with disabilities to enter the workforce, whether that be through self-employment or a business, is seen as a benefit. To my mind we should change this to a labour activation measure. We should see the economic individual and the benefit that person can provide to a business and its profitability. The bottom line is the added value the person can bring. There has been a blockage in many of the Departments, such as the Department of social welfare. The reasonable accommodation grants are not up to scratch. They should be individualised. If people get reasonable accommodations they should not be beholden to an employer but should be free to move on with their accommodations. The accommodations are for the person and that is what they need.

The Department of enterprise has been completely ignoring people with disabilities. The Department of Social Protection looks after labour activation measures. I do not know how many letters I have sent to Ministers and there is a former Minister present. There is a fobbing off. They do not take seriously their responsibilities under the UNCRPD. They will only be taken seriously through exactly what has been said, with regard to having meaningful advocacy and a meaningful and equal seat at the table and not have a token person whom we bring in for the day. They should be seen as serious added value to a progressive policy.

Due to personal experience of family and people who have come to my office I have done work on reasonable accommodations and supports in the workplace.

From the witnesses' point of view, what should we be asking for? I am not in that situation. What should we be asking for? How do we improve? How do we increase the number of deaf people in the workforce? How do we make that better? How can we give people more confidence? We want people to feel that they are valuable assets who are welcome in the workforce. We also want employers to have confidence. We are failing and I am at a loss.

I thank the Senator. Mr. Sherwin has mentioned many times, and there is reference to it in our statement, meaningful engagement with DPOs. It is about sitting at the table. Any policies or strategic plans need to include meaningful engagement with DPOs. They have their own life experience to bring to the table and feedback to give. They know what it is like to work in workplaces.

Self-employment is a particular area for disabled people. Deaf or disabled people in employment get supports but people who are self-employed do not get the same level of support. They get far less support. I do not have any figures or statistics in that regard but we know there are no supports for those in self-employment. The attitude taken towards the two scenarios in which people are employed should be the same. We all thought the recent launch of the work and access programme was great. However, we are talking about up to an allowance of up to 24 hours of interpreting per year for someone who is self-employed. There are 52 weeks in a year. How is it that self-employed people are only get 24 hours' worth of interpretation? Even if someone was only to use an interpreter for one hour per day, we can imagine how quickly those 24 hours would be used up. We need more funding and investment and more meaningful engagement. We need more access to interpreters. It is then that we will see deaf people and people with disabilities progress in the workplace because those supports are being provided. That is going to be a part of the process. While we have this new work and access programme, it is limiting us.

To move into another area, the social inclusion voucher scheme was launched recently through the Department of Social Protection for the deaf community. It started as a pilot project and was then set up. The deaf community was delighted, but there is still a limit to the scheme. A person is allowed five vouchers per year to book an interpreter for five separate occasions. We ask how to problem solve. If we have meaningful engagement from the start, we will have fewer problems to tackle.

The 24 hours is a good start. That provision was not there previously. The UK access to work scheme provides an interpreter for the full working life of a deaf individual. When we take the benefits into account holistically and consider that people are not availing of welfare, recognise the generational lifting of people out of the poverty trap and examine the full picture, for every £1 spent on the scheme, the Exchequer receives back £1.40 or thereabouts. My figures might not be exactly right but they mean there is no loss or ultimate expense to the Exchequer. Investing in employment for disabled and deaf people will result in an overall net gain. We know that every €1 spent on the promotion of healthy lifestyles saves multiples of that amount on the other side in terms of treatment. This is exactly the same kind of scenario.

Awareness training is hugely important. We did a joint project with Enterprise Holdings last year. In the spirit of co-creation, but flipped the other way around, we did some deaf awareness training with the employees of the business and some employee awareness training with our deaf candidates in the placements. It was a great mutual learning experience. It came out of a project we are doing that has a guidance basis. We would like to see more career guidance as a focus.

We need to put disabled people in control of their own assistance budgets and allow people to decide how best to use them for the best outcomes. We must stop taking control of that in too much of a granular fashion. We need more control and empowerment for disabled people when using these grants.

I have a brief follow-up point. I agree with others that the outcomes in terms of the number of people with disabilities who are in employment in Ireland is nowhere near where it needs to be. However, I do not necessarily agree that there is no appetite to try to address the issue. That is true in the Department of enterprise, which I was in, and in other Departments. The truth, however, is that other countries do it better. We can learn quite a bit from, for example, the UK, where there is a tailor-made support package for individual workers. That is a different approach to having a menu of options that applies to everybody, which is how our system works through the work and access supports.

One of the things that would be helpful, and it may be something we, as a committee, can do, would be to be more rigorous in testing the public sector and its commitment. Until the end of this year, across the public sector, there is a requirement to employ people with disabilities at a level of at least 4.5% of the workforce. By the start of next year, that will become 6%. We can interrogate the different entities of the State that employ many people, whether in healthcare, education, enterprise, Departments and so on. As it happens, the Department of enterprise is at or above its quota. The case our guests have made is a correct one. The more people with disabilities who are in decision-making roles, the more successful the policy evolution will be. That is not because people are not trying to do their best but the people who understand the blockages most accurately are the best people to advise on policy development. That is why I think there is a need within Departments to employ people with disabilities and to involve them in policy decision-making around this area. That is probably lacking in some Departments though not all. That is my experience of being in many Departments. The points that have been made are very fair and that is a matter that we, as a committee, can follow up with Ministers and Secretaries General of different Departments and their HR policies. We must ensure that at least some of those who are being employed, the 6% in each Department, should be involved in the disability strategies within those Departments. I am not sure that is always the case.

It is good to have representatives of the alliance of the five DPOs here today. I do not want to go over what other people have talked about. I apologise because I had to go to another meeting. The committee has heard that employers are given support to take on people with disabilities but self-employed people do not get supports to help themselves. That is an issue. Will the witnesses discuss what must be included in a new national disability inclusion strategy and employment strategy to ensure that the issue is addressed for self-employed people with disabilities? It is an area we are beginning to address, and I was self-employed before I entered politics.

Sometimes they are left on their own. I know a lot has been done, but we need to do a bit more for people with disabilities. WorkAbility was set up in 2023 and provided funding to local, regional and national projects with a focus on achieving improved employment outcomes for people with disabilities through a range of support measures. Do the witnesses have any feedback on the operation of this scheme? Has it been a success or is there anything else we need to do?

I want to go back to Deputy Coveney's point on quotas for people working in the workplace with disabilities. We talk about supports. Are the supports going to be made available while we are ticking a box to achieve a percentage? A deaf person, for example, arrives and is working in the workplace, but will they be provided with all the supports they need to stay working in the workplace? This is not just for deaf people, but for all people with disabilities. When we talk about quotas it is not enough. We have to look at the supports needed to maintain those quotas as well. Mr. Sherwin may have an answer to Deputy Feighan’s point. I will bring him in about the operation.

The Deputy's question was about self-employment and supports for self-employment. This is some anecdotal discussion. We have five deaf students working in the coding institute going through a programme learning to code. There is every opportunity they could become freelance coders following that course as many people are involved in the digital economy. As part of that course they are doing with hearing colleagues, they had an equal opportunity to join but they have some extra supports in terms of equity of outcome from that course. There are additional supports being given to them through the course of that to help them have the equity of outcome, so they can work in this area when they are finished. The availability of schemes that anyone in the general public can apply for may just not be enough to address the needs of disabled people to have the same kind of outcome to put them in a position to be self-employed. This is something on which we look forward to working with the Department of equality, and with other Departments through the lifetime of the next national disability strategy. It needs close consultation with the different DPO representatives from different areas of the disability spectrum. We are here from the Irish Deaf Society representing the DPO Network, which covers a broad range of disability areas. We need to talk to each of those areas and see what supports are needed because the language supports needed for deaf people to be involved in self-employment and employment are different from the supports needed by neurodivergent individuals. From our perspective, the State often looks for a one-stop shop for disability. We always try to communicate that it is such a broad spectrum of needs that when you want to consult with DPOs you need to consult with all the different DPOs because their needs are very different. I could not claim to have a neat answer to that question about what exactly is required, but the engagement we are now having with the Department of equality in terms of the national disability strategy is promising. If we can manage to deliver the cross-governmental co-operation that the plan is seeking, I think we will be able to answer those questions.

I thank Ms Quigley and Mr. Sherwin for being here. I thank them for the presentation and for the discussion. We have a lot of work to do to be a more inclusive society for people with disabilities. A huge discussion needs to take place, particularly within the State, but also with the general public. I thank the witnesses for their participation.