Mr. Adam Harris:

Thank you. I spoke to the Co-Chairman, Senator Carrigy, last week and we are awaiting contact from the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission about that piece of work. Some of that is about design. It is important that the Committee on Autism hears directly from autistic people but, for many people, this could be quite an intimidating experience. It is about giving people as much information as possible in advance so they know what to expect, such as having a calmer place to wait in or, for example, having a specific person to do the meet and greet when the person arrives. We have a great template to work from. The first building on this island or in the UK was Stormont, which was accredited by our colleagues in the National Autistic Society over ten years ago. There is a very good template that we can bring here to ensure our Parliament building is autism-friendly. That is obviously important for the work of the committee and I hope it will send an important message to other public services.

On the point in regard to the autism register, anything that enables us to have better statistics is worth exploring. One of the concerns in the autism community around the concept of a register is, first, that it would need to be voluntary, but particularly the governance around any such register because, for most of the history of autism, it has been treated in a very medicalised way. We want to ensure that the information on that register would not be used in such a way by researchers who want to do things to autistic people, who want to cure autistic people, as opposed to actually making the lives of autistic people better as they are.