Dr. Rosalyn Tamming:

With regard to attitudes, the National Disability Authority does a national public attitudes to disability survey every five years and we are due to do our next one in 2022, so we will be planning for that next year. It shows ups and downs in how attitudes change. What we noticed between 2011 and 2016 was that attitudes improved in 2016. We attributed the dip to the recession and its impact on people's attitudes to disability. It will be interesting to see what the effects of Covid are. Some of the actions we take to try to improve attitudes include an annual art competition for national school children to encourage discussion and awareness about disability. There are some other mechanisms to do that.

The NDA is supportive of the optional protocol. I have a word of caution that since 2006, when the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was brought in, there has only been one investigation of all the European countries. It will not be a panacea. If somebody in Ireland submits a complaint, in a way, we have failed. We need to address and try to improve our systems so that nobody needs to use that optional protocol. The NDA has a monitoring role in the code of practice on accessibility of public services and information. We have started to do that in the transport sector, which came up earlier. We are trying to improve that system and roll out that monitoring system to other areas of the public sector.