Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Harris. I am sure we will be seeing a lot more of him in the next nine months. He mentioned that we need to be radical in our approach. I fully agree. The word "radical" is often thrown around in political parlance. I have been a Deputy for two and a half years and I can say that, in general, we are far from radical as a body politic. I am not pointing the finger at anyone in particular.

I hate to localise the issue, but I am familiar with the situation in County Cork. Credit is due to the Taoiseach for his intervention last year in Carrigaline, where, against the clock, we got a special school up and running. The process was managed in such a haphazard way that it was obvious that planning and forward thinking was completely absent, to put it mildly. Were it not for political intervention, we would still be talking about a special school for County Cork. Thankfully, there is another set to be delivered in Rochestown. As I said, there seemed to be no joined-up thinking in the context of the process of delivering the special school in Carrigaline. It was reactive, and far from radical.

We can also see the reactive approach in the emergency legislation that is going through the Dáil and Seanad. The issue has been spoken about for quite a while, yet here we are in the last week of term trying to get the legislation, as welcome as it is, passed. My experience as a Deputy in the last two and a half years has shown me that there is no radicalism here. I just see the machinery of State moving very slowly. However, I hope that more that anything, the work of this committee can highlight how we need to be radical. That is where we need people like Mr. Harris to help point us in the right direction.

I have a question for Mr. Harris on housing. This is an issue I have worked on with Cork City Council and Cork County Council. Some local authorities are better than others in dealing with individual circumstances, whether they involve autism, disability, an elderly person or whatever. To Mr. Harris's knowledge, are there any local authorities that have housing policies which, in the context of housing allocation, reflect the needs of autistic people? Obviously, many people will seek to retrofit houses - and will apply for grants for same - for their children or themselves as time goes by.

Mr. Harris referred to the fact that 80% of autistic people are not working. I have no doubt that a large proportion of them could work if they were given the opportunity to do so. What specific areas should we be targeting to bring people into the workforce and give them the opportunity to contribute to society? I ask Mr. Harris to answer those two questions initially. If there is time, I will raise the issue of assessments of need.