Ms Fleachta Phelan:

I will make several points. On the pathways out of institutionalisation, as members know it is about the services being connected and Departments speaking to each other and co-ordinating. An issue I work on is housing. We often have the experience of people getting an offer of a house from a local authority but the personal assistant hours or support package required is not available on the health side to enable people to move into the house. We have the crazy situation where people are unable to take up a housing offer because they cannot move forward. To come back to the question asked by Senator Higgins, one of the most dramatic examples of this is the more than 1,300 people who are inappropriately placed in nursing homes due to the lack of supports in the system.

With regard to income adequacy and the PUP, I completely agree with the Deputy that it is very heartening to some extent to see how strongly the citizens took a line on this when they looked at it. It is striking and concerning because while there was significant political will in the country to provide an adequate income almost overnight when large swathes of the population suddenly lost their income, there seems to be an acceptance that it is okay for disabled individuals to live for the rest of their lives on a completely inadequate income. It is an entrenched institutionalised inequality.

Something we sometimes hear in the discussion is the need to incentivise disabled individuals into the workforce.

We know employment rates are substantially lower than EU averages. There is scope to address the structural barriers to employment and to increase employment rates, but I am extremely concerned about individuals who cannot work due to their disability. The idea that we could incentivise those individuals by keeping them on an income which is below the poverty line is completely inadequate. On the question of what is adequate, there is a broad societal commitment to the minimum essential standard of living among anti-poverty groups. Meitheal does not factor in the extra cost of disability. If one wishes for adequate provision, one one has to build in the substantial extra costs that we are aware of.