Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is what I am trying to do and what the Green Paper was trying to do, but people were not happy with it. I listened to their concerns. There is a lot of information and we did a lot of consultation during the Green Paper when it was published. We will take lessons from those too. There is now a Cabinet committee and I know there will be a huge focus on this. We have to come together and work together. The organisations representing the disability groups also have to come up with their ideas and solutions and we have to try to find a pathway forward. I know, and we all know, there are people with severe disabilities and we know they are never going to work. We need to make sure they are not being asked to fill out forms and such things. There are also those with a much milder disability. It will be up to them, but it might help them if they were able to go into the workplace. I was in the National Learning Network training centre recently in County Monaghan, and they are doing wonderful work to give people confidence. They told me that during Covid there were a lot of people who lost their confidence, and they have been building it back up to try to get them into the workplace. Some of it has been successful. We need to look at individual cases.

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