Colette Kelleher (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will adjourn shortly because we are conscious of the time. We decided to look at this as a committee because we had a presentation from Leigh Gath, who was presenting on her role but who also spoke about her own personal experience and therefore we got interested in the personal assistants. This has been a very educative process for me today as it was about the impact of a PA service on a person's life in terms of accessing employment, a social life and so on. I thank Owen, Eileen and Jerry for painting that picture very clearly. I thank the Department witnesses also for giving us the facts and figures on the number of people and hours. We had an interesting debate about the definition. Can it be called a personal assistant service with ten hours being provided? We also spoke about the juggling, the rationing and the need for a policy on all of that.

One of the things committees like ours can do is draft reports. Given that this is a policy development area, it might be helpful for us to do so that we could draw together the experiences.

Senator Buttimer spoke about hearing from the PAs. It would not be fair of us to put them on the spot today but we could take a submission from them to complete our knowledge. We might take submissions from elsewhere as well.

I propose that the committee would issue a report on the personal assistant service. Their policy is in development so it might be a useful contribution to their thinking and capturing the benefits but also some of the current critical issues.

The meeting has been very useful. I thank the people in the Gallery who attended also.