Ms Isolde Ó Brolcháin Carmody:

I thank the Deputy. I will put my spake in about accessible streetscapes. I am visually impaired and I use a guide dog. I also use a power chair. Quite often there is unnecessary conflict between the needs of visually impaired pedestrians and wheelchair users. I need tactile paving but I also need pavement cuts. I will give the committee an example. If I go outside my front door, I must immediately go onto the road because there is no pavement cut. There is actually no pavement opposite my house. I cannot get down to my local town without doing some off-roading. This can be a bit scary when I cannot see the traffic. It also means I take up a wider space that someone who is just using a wheelchair. I take up maybe double the space. With regard to street furniture, I do not know how many times over the years I have driven through traffic cones and sandwich boards which have fallen on my guide dogs. There needs to be much more creative thinking and much more involvement. Stop putting us into little boxes that these things are just for visually impaired people, wheelchair users or older people. There are all these complex intersections of needs that always need to be taken into account.

On the Deputy's question about means testing, the alternative is really a modified version of the universal basic income. A pilot scheme to provide artists with a universal basis income was introduced in response to the National Campaign for the Arts. Disabled artists could not avail of this scheme because it did not include guaranteeing the so-called secondary benefits, in other words, our right to housing and the full medical card. All of those things we depend on for basic survival would not have been guaranteed under that scheme. We need a version of a universal basic income where we have a basic level of supports which includes all the so-called secondary supports. If we are working, we would submit an annual tax return and whatever disability payment we are on would be disregarded when it comes to taxable income, but any income over and above basic needs would be taxable by Revenue. Ms Conway and I, and others in the DADA campaign, believe this is the simplest and most straightforward way.

I imagine that removing means testing and reviews from disability payments would save the Department a lot of money in administration. I do not know if anyone has figures for the costs of reviewing benefits versus how much money is recouped by finding supposed benefit fraud, cheats or whatever. The fact that this system is there is a constant reaffirmation of the ableist idea that we are lying about our disability. We are not believed and our assessment or need is not good enough. My proposal, and that put forward by DADA, is an alternative version of universal basic income, one which takes account of the extra supports and needs that we have as disabled people.