Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I thank the Senator for those questions. On the previous discussion, as well as awareness-raising campaigns that have been mentioned, it is worth thinking about the area of peer-to-peer support for employers, where they can get advice and information from other employers and organisations and where they may feel more confident and at ease asking questions about their fears or attitudes. There is a programme called employers for change being funded on a year-to-year basis by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The research we funded with the OECD last year talked about how the area of peer-to-peer support is important to employers across Europe and how a scaled and sustainable solution in the Irish context would be well worth pursuing.

Turning to Senator McGreehan's questions, there is no breakdown of disability type across public sector figures because it is a voluntary sharing of disability data under Part 5 of the Disability Act. We collect anonymised data. We do not want to make it challenging for people to share their disability and once you start breaking down by disability type, that is a risk. We are in the process of reviewing the Part 5 data-collection process and will be piloting new ways of collecting data over the next 18 months and new ways of collecting more information, to see what is feasible in this regard.

We can do a breakdown of disability type in employment from CSO or census figures. The latest data is from 2016 but will be refreshed later this year. It shows that people with intellectual disabilities have the lowest rate of employment while people with deafness or a serious hearing impairment have the highest rate of employment among people with disability.

We have monitoring duty in relation to public sector employment. We do not have powers of compulsion or enforcement. That is often a point of frustration for many. We engage with public bodies consistently throughout the year, particularly where they are falling below the compliance target. We engage with them intensively to offer guidance and support on how they can increase performance in relation to Part 5. Where employees feel they have been discriminated against or reasonable accommodation has not been applied, they, like private sector employees, have the option of taking the case to the Workplace Relations Commission. We appreciate that is a daunting prospect for people and a route they may not wish to go down, but those routes are open.

As my colleague, Ms Wilkinson, said earlier, the ability to apply for reasonable accommodation funding within the public sector would be well worth exploring as part of this review because it would be a further support for public sector employees. Our approach is to guide, advise, support and provide examples of good practice so employers can see what has been achieved and accomplished in the past and therefore understand what is feasible for themselves.

The Senator spoke about the need for streamlining and joined-up thinking. We are involved in a number of cross-departmental working groups that are being convened to achieve just that. For example, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is convening a working group on transitions. It also has a working group on transport supports and assistive technology supports, all in the context of employment. We sit on these groups in our advisory capacity and we conduct research to help inform the deliberations of the group. That is the kind of work the NDA does, seeing the practices, challenges and barriers that are out there, and we carry that knowledge in all our work and from group to group. That helps with some of that knowledge transfer and streamlined thinking the Senator is calling for. It is important that the departmental actors can move forward on solution-finding. It is ongoing work.