Mr. Joe Mason:

With regard to whether the level of disability with which a person presents should preclude them from employment, in our view there is no level of disability which should preclude them. We believe that people with severe and profound disabilities have the same aspirations as everybody else. However, they might express them in a different way. For example, as well as being the chief executive of an organisation for people with disabilities, I am the sibling of a young man of 41 years of age who has a severe and profound intellectual disability. He is my foster brother. He was fostered by my parents in 1980, at which time he was ten years old and had previously resided at St. Ita's psychiatric hospital in Portrane. He got a job through our programme 18 months ago, which means he was almost 40 years old when he got his first experience of employment. Thankfully, my parents, although elderly, are still alive. My brother tends to go to bed on a Friday and not want to get up until Monday because he is tired after his week of work and entertainment. He works on a Tuesday morning and a Friday afternoon in Domino's, the pizza establishment. They are the only two days of the week he is guaranteed to get out of bed. On these days he gets up, puts on his uniform and heads off to work. Work is an extremely important part of his life. He is somebody who we would suggest, and the reports would indicate, is in the severe profound range of intellectual disability. WALK would never make a distinction between people's different levels of ability.