Ms Joan Carthy:

I will respond to the questions on personal assistants and the DART service. On the personal assistants service, PAS, there is a resistance to funding the service. On the employment of personal assistants, there is need for a review of what people are earning and how we can entice people into the service. From the Irish Wheelchair Association's point of view, a large number of our personal assistants are on low contracts and, with additional funding, they would be able to take on more hours. These are the people we need.

There is a problem with taking in other people. There is also a problem relating to people who are on social welfare. If they try to come from social welfare to work in a personal assistance service, as we can only take people on for a low number of hours due to the lack of funding for services, they cannot give up their social welfare payment. They are caught in that position where they cannot come away from jobseeker's allowance or such to take up work because we do not have the extra funding. It is a catch-22 situation. Another issue relates to pay restoration and the funding that should be coming down the track to pay for the personal assistants who received wage cuts. That has not been restored and is an issue. There are people working for the Irish Wheelchair Association, IWA, and other services who could easily take on more hours if the funding is provided.

There is a report from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport relating to the pilot project launched for the DART in late January and early February. The report looks positive but a big part of the problem is that people find it difficult to report when things go wrong on Irish Rail's website. People with disabilities are not really that great for putting in those complaints. I do not think it will be a real reflection of what is happening. As part of the pilot project, the 24 hour notice period was reduced to four hours but staff have been taken out of the stations and stations have been hubbed, so one person might cover four stations, and one still has to ring and hopefully somebody will be there. What happens, more often than not, is that somebody might be there to get a person on to the DART but there might not be somebody at the other end to get a person off, which in itself is a huge problem. A couple of organisations came together to push that with Irish Rail. We are keeping an eye on the reports and on our own members and any issues they have so that we can report back separately to Irish Rail's report.