Ms Gillian Kearns:

Mr. Harris has covered a lot of what I would have said. One way to transform services is to have more neurodivergent people informing how those services are set up. That would be a huge step in the right direction.

On language, it should be "Nothing about us without us" so that the people who should be asked this question are autistic people themselves. As Mr. Harris said, the vast majority of autistic people prefer the term "autistic". It is an inherent part of who we are and informs our entire personality and neurotype. It is not something we can take away or that can be cured and, therefore, we prefer it. Many polls have been done on this and many questions have been asked in online spaces. The overwhelming preference is for autistic. Obviously, individuals can identify as they like but that is how it is as a community.

We would also like to move away from the use of functioning labels, such as mild and severe. Do people ask if a person is mildly neurotypical? Everyone has different support needs and everyone needs support in some ways. No man is an island. These labels are demeaning and dehumanising, while saying nothing about what support people need. It would be much more helpful to ask and to talk to people as humans.

The Deputy mentioned the Autism Spectrum Disorder Bill. While there are disabling parts of being autistic, and much of that is in the social world in which we live and how that is not set up for us, being referred to as disordered is very dehumanising. I see it a lot in contexts where I do administration with parents, and that is the language professionals use so I am not having a go at parents about this. They will say things like "my ASD child". They are literally saying, "my autism spectrum disordered child". As Mr. Harris said, language is really important and no human being deserves to be spoken about in those terms.

I apologise. As obviously this is quite emotive for me, I will move on before I get upset.

Behavioural interventionist therapies and therapeutic services in Ireland are already here. They are already in use and are being employed by many services. They are informing much practice. My background is early childhood education. I have worked in schools. I work in care settings and I see them being used by people who may not necessarily be trained as an ABA therapist but who are using the techniques. However, a good few of our major universities offer ABA training courses. NUI Galway and DCU offer them and Trinity College has an entire department. People in Ireland are being trained in these interventions.

As I said, it is a multibillion euro business and there is so much recent evidence on the harms that are caused. We included the harm and the ethical implications of what it is in our submission. There are so many rights-based infractions on teaching people that who they are inherently is wrong. We are very concerned about compliance. Compliance training is what they are trying to do and that is the language they use. Teaching young people to override their own, inherent understanding of themselves and to conform leaves them highly vulnerable to abuse.

Our major concern with ABA is it is leaving already vulnerable people even more vulnerable to abuse, because, they learn to subsume their feelings and beliefs about themselves to a higher authority. I am gone off track. ABA and the harms it has caused form a growing body of research. The Cochrane report is an independent psychological report that did a massive study on ABA and found no evidence of it being effective. A growing body of research shows it is actively harmful.

Autistic people have a very short life expectancy. I am 44 and would be considered an autistic elder because our life expectancy is between 31 and 55 years of age. As Mr. Harris said, one of the largest reasons for autistic deaths is suicide, especially in the case of those without an intellectual disability. Linked with knowing the harms of ABA and knowing we have a shortened life expectancy, it is hard to argue we should be rolling it out throughout the country.