Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

If someone is already isolated, whether his or her area is locked down or not makes little difference. This is an ongoing experience for some families, which existed even prior to Covid. Some people have said that while family carers are not talked about enough, at least now, for once, other people in society are experiencing the same issues that families and people with disabilities face all the time, such as in regard to access to public services, education or employment. Everybody else in the country is now feeling what can often be a normal experience for the cohort of individuals that Inclusion Ireland represents, whether they are in lockdown or otherwise, even if lockdown might make it more difficult.

There were great community efforts over the past six months. The worry is that those kinds of supports, as the country has opened up, are now few and far between. As for the feeling that we are all in this together, some people will not see that because they will not get the opportunity to experience it.

Regardless of whether supports are provided by the State, a voluntary organisation or a local authority, we need to remember that a cohort of people will be locked down in their homes for a substantial period. We talked about education and we must ensure there is educational provision that is robust. We must also ensure that surveys carried out six months from now do not make the same kinds of findings that we found in our surveys in May, which showed that remote learning was not working for some children. We reiterate that every child under the age of 18 has a statutory right to an education and we need to find some mechanism to fulfil that right for all the children in the various scenarios we know about as well as those that might be unforeseen.