Ms Maria Ní Fhlatharta:

I will try to wrap up a few issues. On representation, there are 220 Oireachtas Members. The Deputy can tell me there is only one disabled person but I do not believe him. We comprise 13.5% to 25% of the population, depending on what metric is used, so there are more of them here.

In terms of participation, many very creative solutions are being proposed today but the greatest one that will work is properly resourcing, supporting and engaging with disabled persons' organisations. In preparing for today, six people helped to write the submission that Ms Hassett and I made earlier, and 12 other people fed into it. We all have very different disabilities and we come from different areas, and we are able to identify the barriers on that basis. That is where our expertise comes from. That is probably the single most effective way to facilitate participation of disabled people in the political process.

In terms of primary medical certificates and supports, Ms Bonnie did a very good job of detailing why personal assistant, PA, support was different because it kept the person concerned in charge - because it gives agency and autonomy. We also probably need that rights focus in approaching other areas of disability support, and that includes primary medical certificates. What primary medical certificates do is they say that if someone's body fits in the box exactly, they need this support and that support. However, none of our bodies fit in any box exactly. When we are assessing services, it needs to be directed by the disabled person in voicing what they need and what supports they need, and they should be supported from that basis. No tick-box exercise is going to say exactly what I need, what Ms McGovern needs, what Ms Hassett needs or what Ms Bonnie needs.

In terms of parental capacity assessments, I will try to be brief and try not to be angry. In a world where we are currently focusing on people being forced to be apart from their children for completely unreasonable things, parental capacity assessments are a tick-box exercise designed to separate disabled people from their children because we do not trust disabled people to be parents. That is simply it. We do not have a way to say there is no risk and because we inherently see disabled people as a risk, and we do not actually provide people with the support to parent; that is all parental capacity assessments can see. To everyone who is a parent on the committee, I guarantee they would fail this. We do not ask any other parents, when their child is born, how to raise a teenager. We need to stop looking at disabled parents as a danger and start seeing what measures we can have to support them.