Ms Catherine Naughton:

I thank the Senator for those good points. The first she mentioned was about capacity. Of course, a problem in every country is the ability of DPOs to be able to have the resources to do their work. We find in many countries now, when governments take a good initiative to try to include people with disabilities in developing transport policy, that if the DPOs do not have the human and financial resources to do the policy work, it is hard. I will use the example of the European Disability Forum. We have staff to participate in policy advocacy, analysis, giving input and me being here today because we have public funding. The European Commission has the rights, equality and citizenship programme and there is an open call for applications. It is not a closed, targeted call as some countries would have. DPOs are able to apply, explain what they can do, explain what they want to do and receive funding. I am not saying that with this funding there are not co-financing requirements and other obligations, but it is public funding.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities did a general comment on the participation of persons with disabilities, and funding of a diverse disability movement was one of the things to which it drew the highest amount of attention. Reliable, sustainable funding is required, even in crises. I remember the first meeting I had with our board when Covid-19 started; we called it corona then. The only DPO in our membership that had immediately been given some funding from its government to help was Disabled Peoples' Organizations Denmark. The government had come to it and asked how it could help the government reach people with disabilities. It gave funding to help DPOs get their work online, to help people with disabilities tackle isolation and loneliness and to help target them with information that was accessible. This was funding that was provided in the emergency to help offset the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on people with disabilities when there was the lockdown. Honestly, the real start is public financing.

The second issue is how to reach all the active national grassroots DPOs and not only the platform organisations at national level and European level. Indeed, the work we do in Brussels, even in policy advocacy, is very far away from people's day-to-day reality. We will continue something that happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of training and capacity building was previously only for members who were able to provide a budget for travelling to meetings, but we do an awful lot of things online now. Obviously, people must have an Internet connection and so forth, but we have way more participation in training and networking events online. We miss the networking, relationship building and collaboration of face-to-face meetings, but we will keep a lot of training online. It is keeping an open door. There is a lot of information provided for anyone who wishes to show up. That is accessible with sign language and captioning, so it is still necessary to put some resources in.

Even national organisations that do not have all the grassroots organisations in their memberships can provide things through their websites and through online meetings. They can make sure everybody has the information and can get involved. When a consultation is being done, for example, on new climate actions in Ireland, while it is very dry to do just a written contribution or consultation online through the website, it still allows people to contribute. Having public debates online in accessible formats means ordinary people who do not have the days to travel to Dublin for meetings can participate. Making it low-threshold entry for people to participate in discussions is something that could enhance involvement of grassroots organisations and enable them to participate.