Ms Fiona Weldon:

I thank the committee for this opportunity. I am a PA user. I work for ILMI and I am on the board of the ÁT network. I have been supporting people to get an individualised budget. One of the key issues is that we are finding it really hard to debundle money already within a service such that people can take it out and use it as a personalised budget to live the life that they want. That is something the committee could look at. There is no system at the moment to help disability services or the HSE look at how they would allocate funding to a person that wants to leave a service and have a personal assistant as opposed to a day or residential service.