Ms Isolde Ó Brolcháin Carmody:

I will answer the question about Catherine's law and best practice and I will ask Ms Conway to talk about being self-employed. Catherine's law does not apply to me as I am in receipt of the blind pension. I am one of 1,069 people in the country out of 55,000 blind or visually impaired people in receipt of the blind pension. As Mr. Kerr or somebody else said, changing from the blind pension to another payment is very complex. I can only credit this to being an historical anomaly. The rate of the blind pension has not been kept in step with the disability allowance. If I get a PhD bursary, which I am entitled to apply for in the near future, it will be counted as means and I would no longer get the blind pension, my medical card, my fuel allowance, my living alone allowance, my free television licence. The whole gamut of extra supports immediately goes down the tubes once someone is deemed as having more than €20,000 in their savings account.

There is a major disconnect between the different systems, which I think is just historical. I have been in receipt of the blind pension since I was 18. I once had a phone call to the old age pension office trying to explain that I was coming off the back-to-education allowance and going on the back-to-work enterprise allowance. I was transferred to five or six different people because nobody in the old age pension office knows anything about these things. They do not know anything about scholarships or bursaries either.

There are other payments, such as incapacity benefit and the invalidity pension. How can we still be using the term "invalidity", someone who is invalid, in this day and age? That is shocking, but it is indicative of us having inherited this historical system based on poor laws where local health boards decided on what the deserving poor needed. It is not rights based at all.

The Deputy asked about countries with best practice. I have engaged in discussions on this with groups such as Independent Living Movement Ireland, ILMI, and Disabled Women Ireland. No country in the world seems to have got it right. That means that if we get our act together, Ireland will lead. We could determine what is best practice. We could determine the best way of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and take a leadership role. It is possible for Ireland to do that. We do not need to copy other countries.

I will ask Ms Conway to talk about what is involved in being self-employed.