Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

I have experience of engaging with a number of different Departments while wearing different hats over the years. When some Departments are looking at developing new policies and initiatives, they are inclined to take a co-design approach very early on to get input from stakeholders. Over the years, our experience with the Department of Education and Skills has been, as Mr. O'Connor indicated, that one is informed of the direction the Department is going and that organisations are used more as a sounding board rather than being engaged with at the beginning. Inclusion Ireland represents 66,000 people with intellectual disabilities and their family members. We have a substantial mechanism to get the voices of parents to the table. For example, over a two-week period and under difficult circumstances, we had more than 1,000 responses to the survey that was just conducted. It is not that those voices and those opinions, which can sometimes contradict those of parents, cannot be brought to the table; it is just that they are brought to the table a bit too late in the day.

I will go back to a question Deputy Ó Laoghaire asked and about which he spoke to the Minister yesterday: the question of capacity and of what the Department did to engage with educational stakeholders and schools to see how many schools and staff members were likely to opt in before this programme was launched and before up to 24,000 families were promised that their children would have some level of provision over the summer.

What normally happens is that the Department opens up applications for the July provision programme in April and those applications are then processed over a two-month period. Post-primary pupils then engage in July provision from the month of June and primary children engage for the month of July. Again, a limited number normally qualify. Knowing that public health guidelines and lockdown measures could be alleviated to such a degree that these schemes could be rolled out, I would have expected the Department to engage from April. This is similar to the concerns I have about special school transport. If the Department is not on top of this matter now, we are going to have difficulties in September. It is an issue of process with regard to the way certain Departments have conducted themselves during the Covid crisis. Some Departments have gone into fifth gear while others have kept to their standard mode of addressing issues.