Dr. Joanne McCarthy:

It is because that is what they see under section 38. That funding is the Vote. What they see is their core responsibility under the Vote. Increasingly over time, our analysis has been that there has been a greater consolidation around how they spend their money on that specifically. Even though the policy is towards mainstreaming and supporting people to live in the community, for the services that are required to enable a person to do that, such as the personal assistant the home supports and the respite, that person receives little or no investment through the budgetary process because it gets eaten up. It is important for us to understand that.

The other matter we would like to point out and that the DFI has been strong on for a while is that when budgets are planned for in a singular way and when a budget is planned for Department by Department, unexpected consequences can happen. We were involved in an initiative here within the Oireachtas in January of last year where three Departments came together, namely, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, the Department of Education and Skills, and the Department of Health. They began to look at some of the common themes that happen. We have again managed to unearth that.

We were part of the Oireachtas disability group, ODG, and only about a week or two weeks ago we were in and the Department of the Taoiseach brought in the Secretaries General of each Department with the ODG to talk about how they could look at bringing about sustainable change and to look at the links that happen across Departments. Our findings and analysis and what we are hearing back from our members is that we cannot look at one particular measure only without it being stitched in with another measure with which it has a relationship. A perfect example is the access to assistive technology, which Deputy Harty brought up earlier. If assistive technology is available within primary school, when the transition is made into post-primary school, unless it is a third level college, a student will not have access or resources to access technology there. Even if the student does get it at third level, once he or she is finished, he or she hands back that technology and has to reapply when entering into the workforce. There is no assistive technology passport that shadows the person to make it easy to transition from those points, and these are critical matters that can be planned while budgets are being prepared.