Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

I can come back to the Deputy's point and tie in with remarks made by some of the other members.

As Mr. Dolan said, our undertakers are partially responsible for sorting out the Time to Move on from Congregated Settings strategy. They always have been. In the period since 2012, when the strategy was launched, over 1,000 people have passed on rather than moving out to live within the community. The issues with this are as follows. We are both under-resourcing and under-prioritising this as a policy. According to the HSE's service plan for 2021 - and consistently in its service plan every year - the number of people set to move out into community-based settings is under 200. That does not mean those people are moving out to live on their own, isolated from supports; it involves moving the supports out with them.

In relation to housing, one issue is that in cases where people choose to move from a residential setting under the care of a service provider out into social housing, quite often they find it impossible to decouple their funding from the disability service provider, which gets substantial funding for each person that is in a residential setting. While those people might be able to acquire the social housing, they simply cannot avail of it because of that. Under the national housing strategy for people with disabilities, there is an obligation to develop national protocols and frameworks for interagency co-operation, right down to local authority level. The best practices that exist need to be shared, but it must be consistent across the country.

In response to the Chairman, Deputy Moynihan's point, when the Covid restrictions are lifted, I would love to invite the whole committee to visit Inclusion Ireland's offices. In our boardroom, there hangs a picture that was painted by Ms Frieda Finlay, a former chair of the organisation, called Gathering Dust. I have repeatedly mentioned this. It is a painting of probably 300 different documents, papers, legislation, steering group and departmental reports related to disability on the shelves that have never been implemented or have been partially implemented. Mr. Dolan has mentioned four key items of legislation. There is a significant deficit in funding implementation. We provide the legislation and the framework, but we do not actually provide the funds For example, in respect of the Time to Move on from Congregated Settings strategy, which is part of the HSE transforming lives programme, without exception, it was requested that most of those streams be implemented on a cost-neutral basis for the HSE. That was impossible from the get-go. Project management came in late in the process, three or four years into some of those programmes.

There are good examples of cases within Departments where either legislation or a policy has been agreed in the programme for Government, and from the start a budget has been allocated to implement it, a strong project management team put in place, along with interdepartmental communication, co-operation and, more so, accountability. These are the types of model that we need to see in other areas of disability. A good example is the access and inclusion model under the remit of the former Department of Children and Youth Affairs. It is one of the few policies under the programme for Government and the national disability inclusion strategy that has actually been fully implemented and year on year, it is about improving it and developing its capacity. Therefore, there are good examples of where this works. However, we do suffer from what some refer to as "implementitis". It is significant across Departments. When the new national disability and inclusion strategy is launched and cross-departmental strategies and steering groups are established, we will face the same challenge again.

The implementation is poor because they are not funded to be rolled out in any significant or meaningful way.

Deputy Hourigan also mentioned the effects of Covid over 2021 and 2022. Aside from the roll-out of the vaccine programme, we really do not know what is ahead of us in terms of variants and everything else, but what we know is that there has been a significant impact on people with disabilities both in services but more so in the community. These are people who are not connected to services. They are people who are living independently, albeit with support. We keep talking about services in the context of the HSE, but there are people who can no longer go into their employment because of the risk to their personal health and people are isolated within their communities. I hope that when the restrictions reduce and we look at developing inclusive communities in 2022 and 2023 that we build back better. When we identify people who are isolated by Covid, we must identify those who were isolated long before Covid and ensure we do not leave them behind in the country's recovery.

Deputy Cairns mentioned the optional protocol. Again, it comes down to accountability at an international level for the State. All too often we shy away from accountability, whether it is at a Civil Service level or a political level. We have to wait until we get to the ballot box. This was going to make the State accountable at an international level, where we as individuals have the right to call our country into question. We have the draft report on the UNCRPD. For some, reading that report does not reflect their lived experience. It is a description of the State's systems, with a shine on some of them, but certainly for individuals looking at them, they will say that this is not about them and their lived experience.

Part of the network is being able to capture that.

Regarding intellectual disabilities specifically, Inclusion Ireland works very hard to try to create a platform for individuals to be able to have their say, but that takes time. If there are consultations and submissions to be made, it takes time to work with people with intellectual disabilities to develop their capacity to speak for themselves. Following this meeting, Inclusion Ireland is before the Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science where we have a person with intellectual disabilities speaking on the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs, EPSEN, Act and their experience of special education in mainstream education. It takes time to enable people to be able to speak for themselves. In any Government process, whether it is consultation, input into committees, accommodation or time, it requires us to put in the time and to create a space for people who have the quietest voices in all of this. Whether it is a voice, an augmentative and alternative communication, AAC, device or other means of communication, we need to create that space for them.

Regarding housing submissions, I am not sure of the numbers, but Inclusion Ireland created an easy-to-read survey for people with intellectual disabilities to be able to submit their thoughts into the national housing strategy for people with disabilities. Departments are more open to that, as part of the new standard to involve people with all types of disabilities to be able to communicate their thoughts on the formulation of Government policy, but we need to do more and better.