Ms Gráinne Berrill:

With regard to Senator Naughton's question, the disability access route to education, DARE, has improved access to education for a large number of young people but generally not the young people we support. There is a great deal of evidence that there is no progression route into third level education, particularly for people with intellectual disabilities. We are doing work on that at the moment with Tallaght IT in the context of a programme based in the college for people. It is normally called a rehabilitative training programme but it is being reconfigured in order that a person who wishes to access education can do so in the mainstream environment. DARE is very much a CAO-based route. A young person who wants to access DARE has to have done the mainstream leaving certificate. Someone who does the leaving certificate applied is not able to tap into it and that is a big gap as well.

Senator Moran has been a fantastic supporter of our programme in many ways. She asked what are the gaps and challenges we see. They are so many and we do not have time to go into them now. This links to the suite of options we referred to earlier. The progression routes for most young people with disabilities are limited and that is the main challenge. The person has to fit the service rather than the service fitting the person. Much of that is funding directed. New Directions, the Department of Health document, acknowledges that services are not in place to fit the person but to fulfil the needs of the service in respect of tapping into funding. We would like to see tailored, individualised programmes or services which are accessible in a variety of ways by different people.

Senator Moloney kindly proposed the nationwide roll-out of our PEER project, which we would love, but we would like Oireachtas Members to keep the fact that there is a gap in the youth guarantee on the agenda. A comprehensive employment strategy will be published at the end of the year. We do not know what it will contain but it will be a great document. Much of the stuff will have been said previously. We would like Oireachtas Members to drive the recognition that there is a gap affecting young people and to address how we bridge it. One of our suggestions might be a working group of like-minded people who would like to drive something like this through.