Mr. Robbie Sinnott:

I will make a brief comment on something Deputy Tully said about DPOs and other representative organisations. Where disability matters are concerned, the UNCRPD and the new paper from the National Disability Authority, NDA, make it clear that the only representative organisations are the DPOs. There is a framework laid out in general comment 7 as to what properly constitutes a DPO. It would be helpful if that framework was applied when the State organises its register. This will be a cultural shift, but when the register is being put together, the State has to consult DPOs, although I know that is a bit like the chicken and the egg. In everything directly involving disability, DPOs come first but DPOs also have to be involved in other ways because everything affects disability, as set out in general comment 7, paragraph 17.

Everyone filled in the census forms on Sunday night. Since most severely visually impaired people were not able to do so independently, they were in the same position as they were in 1901. That is not acceptable. I am unsure about Wales or Scotland, but at least two of the three nations of Great Britain have allowed censuses to be filled in online since 2013. The Central Statistics Office, CSO, did not respond to us formally after we looked for something similar, only by phone. This is a case where others literally have to be people's voices. People will not discuss sensitive issues that need to be filled in. For example, where they are asked whether they were previously married, they might have to say that they have never been married. Who knows? The service providers will only do one type of Braille, which they enforced in 2013 regardless of what the rest of us learned in school and have used for all the intervening years. There is only a click of a button in the difference in a drop-down menu, but all of the Braille service providers in Ireland ideologically refuse to do it, so even when the questions were sent out in Braille, they were not accessible to many Braille readers.

I referred to our Capel Street consultation. We made a submission to that, but it will be aggregated among the thousands of others, especially from cyclists. Cycling is fantastic if you can cycle, but the rights of disabled people to access their own environment safely is enshrined in European and Irish law. It is in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This is something that we cannot take for granted. For someone who is visually impaired, getting from one end of Capel Street to the other used to take 20 minutes. Now, it takes well over an hour. One of our members described it to me yesterday as "traumatic".

There is e-scooter legislation and, in 2019, the then Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport issued a ministerial order and announced that he was giving €2 million to the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, NCBI, to set up a wayfinding centre. Problematically, the intention is for the NCBI to be placed at the core of consultation on any matter relating to transportation in this country, but that is clearly inimical to the UNCRPD and the role of DPOs. We were not consulted on the wayfinding centre and do not believe that there is a need for it. It is an opportunity cost because people need to be trained and helped in their own environments first and foremost.

Ireland has to implement the European disability Act by June. We wrote to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth – we sometimes call it the "Department of Everyone" – last July to see whether we could help with the consultations. We were completely ignored and did not even get a response. This is the sort of issue we are meeting.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Our voice has either been aggregated among thousands of others at best or else just completely and utterly ignored.