Ms Dolores Murphy:

I will pick up on some questions, particularly those regarding housing. There was mention of private rented housing and whether there is guidance or regulation required. Building regulations are applied to private housing, even if it is rented, but prior to 2000, the regulations did not mention anything about accessibility. What was provided was not required to comply with any accessibility elements. When newer building regulations were introduced in 2000, only the minimum amount was required. For example, the term used was for a house to be "visitable" rather than accessible. There is a higher expectation for public areas of apartment buildings but with regard to space where people would enter and live, the requirement was for the unit to be "visitable". This means that somebody with a disability could enter and be there in a social area. The bathroom facilities required may not be adequate for somebody who is a wheelchair user. That is still the case, although building regulations have been upgraded; there is now a 2010 version of those regulations but the section on housing has not changed. The section on public buildings has been changed. It is still only required that a unit be visitable, which is not suitable for somebody using a wheelchair.

Senator van Turnhout asked about the Ombudsman and work done by it some years back. We are aware of that work but the Senator asked what has changed since. The answer is probably that not a lot has changed. The case in question concerned social housing and no such housing has been built in the intervening years. Towards the end of the boom, there were some examples from councils - Dublin City Council is the one in question - which were "piecemeal" or random. On Londonbridge Road there is a social housing project built by Dublin City Council towards the end of the boom and accessibility was integrated. A percentage of the units built there were designed to be suitable for people using wheelchairs, and particularly those using powered wheelchairs. The people concerned would have been involved with consultation and design processes. It is a good quality housing project with a mix of different family units and general and particular accessibility features. Unfortunately, that came at the end of the boom and the practice was piecemeal. It was never "systemised" or developed into a process.

That is the challenge now. The social housing strategy launched last week by the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, discusses eliminating the social housing list. There are almost 4,000 people with disabilities nationally on social housing lists.

A similar number of people with disabilities would be expected to move out of congregated settings. These are people who need a particular type of housing design. There is a great deal of government documentation in that regard, including the national housing strategy for people with a disability and the congregated settings report, while the local authorities are required to set up housing and disability steering groups. Many of the pieces of the jigsaw are in place or are being put in place, but the challenge is how one translates that into the supply of social housing that is suitable to the needs of people who have a mobility impairment. That has not existed up to now and it must happen.

As my colleagues mentioned, accessible design works best when there is an engagement with the client group, the people who will use the facility. That engagement can be established and maintained over time. It is not a once-off engagement but something that would be established and worked through. There have been many examples of that but, again, the challenge is for it to become part of the mainstream way of doing business.

In terms of consultation with people with disabilities, often an assumption can be made that the designers will know best, that they know what they are doing when they are proposing accessible design. In our experience, that has not necessarily been the case. When the end user is involved much of the discussion would deliver a change to an initial design to a design that meets the requirements of the people who will use it. There was one example this week in which my colleague, Vijoy Chakraborty, was involved. The National Rehabilitation Hospital will be rebuilt and planning permission has been approved or is in the process of being approved. One might think that all the experts would know about the design but they have set up a consultation group which involves the Irish Wheelchair Association, DeafHear and the National Council for the Blind as well as staff, users of the hospital, the designers and the developers. That is the process and those consultation meetings will happen over a period of time. The process takes in the experience and guidance of the user of the hospital and the various organisations representing people with disabilities, and it will eventually deliver a very good quality hospital design.