Ms Mary Finn:

I just want to circle back to one or two things relating to assistive technology not following people when they change employer. To give an example, I supported a person in the past who was in need of some assistive technology to be able to do their job. This person was looking for speech-to-text software but it could not be integrated with the custom-designed software that her department was using. When there are custom-designed pieces of software being used to support a particular department, integrating something off-the-shelf is not always easy. When designers are designing custom-built systems for organisations, it would be great if they could think about how other people might need to interact with it and how accessibility features can be included in that.

There are a number of grants that organisations and individuals can apply for. The partial capacity benefit is for people who have been away from work for about six months. An investigation was done in recent years as to whether that grant could be split into an employment support for those in employment as well as a grant for the cohort of people who cannot continue in employment. That way, at some point in the future, people who transition into employment might move from the disability allowance and keep their secondary supports like the travel pass and medical card. I know from working in employability that people want to safeguard those and will restrict their career progression to protect their travel pass or medical card. If they could transition to other grants such as the partial capacity benefit, and if that could be split into an employment support, they could retain a portion of their grants as well as their medical card and travel pass. We know from the report on the cost of disability that the cost of disability to individuals is quite significant. The figures range between €9,000 and €11,000 per person per annum. That is the context. That does not even take into account the difficulties people have in trying to access public transport to get to work and all the other issues they might experience in trying to support and maintain their employment. For future reference, there are grants available but we might need a realignment with regard to how people use and access them.