Mr. John Dolan:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for this opportunity. We welcome our colleagues, Ms Lorraine Dempsey and Ms Jacqui Browne, who have introduced themselves.

The Joint Committee on Disability Matters requires a complementary mechanism through the Department of An Taoiseach, namely, the operation of a project management function to ensure effective and efficient implementation across the Civil Service and public service area. This is urgently needed.

There are over 640,000 people with disabilities in Ireland and they have a shared reality of poverty and exclusion from many things that others rightly take for granted. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, requires nothing less than the will and preference of people with disabilities to be front and centre and, equally, that all organisations, be they State, voluntary, community or private, work together. They all have an obligation to work together to make this great project work.

The DFI has been involved in the implementation of a number of national disability strategies. This is our learning from that. If Ireland uses the same approach for implementing the UNCRPD it will not succeed. The programme for Government commitments to the implementation of the UNCRPD came after the arrival of the Covid pandemic. We now need, and expect to have, to have a strong implementation programme for the remainder of this Dáil. We look forward to what the budget might bring us in a number of months' time as a start to that.

I will now discuss progress on implementing the UNCRPD, the optional protocol and the State's response. In our opening remarks I laid out a number of important foundations to progress implementation, namely, the new Department and a full Cabinet Minister with disability as part of the remit, along with equality and other related organisations.

Ms Dempsey and Ms Browne mentioned December, when the State published its first initial draft report on the UN convention. This was a very positive move. DFI, as one of the funded members of the DPCN, consulted within our own disability family, people with disabilities and organisations. I want to make some points that came out of that consultation.

Ireland is rich in policy and relevant legislation. We are constantly and consistently weak on implementation. There are notable parts of Education for Persons with Special Needs, EPSEN, Act , the Disability Act 2005, the Citizens Information Act 2007 and the more recent Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act. They are all pillars of disability inclusion legislation, with significant elements of them not having been implemented. That is not a bad place to start catching up.

Ireland continues to have the highest rate of poverty among people with disabilities in the EU. We still have a big problem in terms of having reliable and relevant data on people with disabilities to better target our initiatives and work.

Ireland still has to ratify the UN optional protocol. When the convention was ratified in March 2018 there was a sting of disappointment that the protocol was not ratified at the same time. For God's sake, let the Oireachtas get on with it now and encourage it to happen. There is no substantive reason that cannot be done now.

To conclude before I hand over to Dr. Joanne McCarthy, I wish to state that the DFI position on how well we are doing in compliance can be best characterised as being policy-strong but lacking overall project management. We are not getting on with doing the job effectively. That is the key point.