Mr. John Dolan:

I will pick up on the first question and let colleagues pick up on the issue of school closures etc. It is as simple as this: one of the roles of the Taoiseach's Department is co-ordination. It is the Department that supports the Taoiseach of the country. It is our absolute experience that the efforts to achieve implementation to date have fallen down because there was not what I would call a ward boss, or somebody with authority who can ring up any Department and say, "Come on, lads, you need to think this through a bit more and work with other Departments." All the problems people with disabilities have are exacerbated because they have to go back out the door of one Department, go down the street and queue up to go into another Department, local authority or other organisation to actually get things moving. The Oireachtas disability group and the voluntary members, the Disability Federation of Ireland, National Disability Services Association, Inclusion Ireland and Independent Living Movement Ireland — I believe I have mentioned them all but I may be corrected if I have not — looked for two critical infrastructural things in the run-up to the last general election. One was a committee, this committee. We did not come up with the phrase "disability matters"; some other genius came up with that lovely name. It is all about the disability matters in people's lives. We also looked for a Minister of State in the Department of the Taoiseach who would have responsibility for disability matters and who could, in effect, pick up the phone, pull Departments together and go back to the Taoiseach and say we need more in a certain area. It is that leverage that is needed at the centre. We did not solve the unemployment problem of ten, 11 or 12 years ago without a whole-of-government approach to it. It was the job of every Minister and Department every day of the week. The response to Covid has been at a whole-of-government level. It is not just been regarded as a health issue for the Department of Health to solve. If disability and implementing the UNCRPD involve a lived commitment, the Taoiseach's Department has to find a way to put in what I describe as a project management system to help and support and to test that things are happening efficiently and effectively. Public service reform is supposed to be about efficiency and effectiveness in carrying out the commitments the State has already made.