Mr. Tom McLoughlin:

I will come in briefly on the issue of the transition. One aspect of the transition is that the person is going from a structured system to what is pretty much a totally unstructured set-up. I refer to the comments of Ms Mullan. I am not commenting on applied behaviour analysis, ABA, etc., but there are a lot of red herrings or magic mushrooms out there. By and large, parents cannot be expected to sift through that. When it comes to the transition from education to adult services, there are two aspects. The first is who is doing it. The second is the fact that there is a reinventing of the wheel trying to figure out what the needs of the person are in an adult world when those needs are already well known from an educational point of view.

The bigger difficulty is simply that, by and large, the adult services are a mirage. It is a case of the emperor having no clothes. There is nothing out there. I think Mr. Doyle referenced disability managers. We had an excellent disability manager. The guy should have been awarded numerous medals, given the number of cases he had to try to manage. He had to take people a year before they left school and try to sift through endless unclear placements on the other side. There are fundamental problems with what is available and the transition process itself is fundamentally flawed. It is almost a case of having to tear it up and start it again.

I acknowledge the need for rights-based legislation but I urge caution in that regard. The process of having to go through legislation or a legal case is an indication that the system has failed. By the time there is a hearing and the case is processed, etc., endless years will have passed and it will have exhausted the parents and distracted people from the core issue. We should not have to engage lawyers for everything we do in life. It is incredible that we still need rights-based legislation but we probably do because the State is a little reticent to step up to the plate. There is significant goodwill but the bigger issue is that the hard yards and the hard work of putting something in place have not been done. We have been doing this for more than 12 years and still struggle with the incoherent multiplicity of services, so, of course, parents starting when their children are aged between 15 and 18 will struggle. It is incoherent. If that incoherence is recognised upfront, that may signal progression. Looking for something that is not there is quite an exhausting process as well.