Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

The relief is going to be felt only by those parents whose children are back in schools. We have spoken several times about children who simply will not be able to return to school. For parents who now have to face issues with their own employment if they have employment contracts, their only option now is to stay at home permanently. There is a significant economic cost to such a family where it is left with these types of decisions to make.

The isolation will continue. We all know about the reductions in other supports outside of education, such as home support, access to respite and all the other features that might originally have supported the family of a child with disabilities. There will still be fundamental issues with the provision of all those other measures. For families where the children cannot go back to school because of their complex disabilities and medical needs, that isolation will continue, and we need to look at how we can prioritise those families, whether for primary care or disability services or supports, and ensure they will not remain isolated in their own homes.

Everyone is talking about the word "cocooning", but there are families with children who will be required to cocoon continuously until such time as we are on top of Covid and vaccination programmes have been rolled out. If such families' children are not able to go back to school, there has to be something for them in order that this isolation, which I have described to the committee in recent months, will not just continue. Now we know about it - we have voiced it and documented it - and we know there will be a cohort for whom that isolation will continue unless we find other means to ensure that their family units are supported. I refer in particular to siblings included in a new cocoon, given that they are unable to go back to school because the family and medical teams deem that the risk is so high for that one family member that the whole family must withdraw from society, although society does not need to withdraw from the whole family.