Mr. Desmond Kenny:

I want to amplify what Mr. Cawley said in response to Deputy Cairns, which has also been touched on by Mr. Harris. We participate in consultative processes, and as Mr. Harris said, some of us travel distances, at some expense, to do so. Meetings are also held during working hours, and if you are fortunate enough to have a job as a disabled person, your employer does not take too lightly to you taking time off. I know we have to look for an answer to the Deputy's question. The resourcing of DPOs has to be seen as an integral part of the way forward. We spend nearly €2 billion on service provision that has been analysed to the nth degree in terms of value for money in different reports over the decades. It does not change. The language around separation changes. I may get into some trouble for saying this, but we have what I would call an industry around disability that continues, by accident, to create a dependency on it, rather than liberating us through they type of things we have been talking about today. It can happen by accident that somehow or other the liberation that has been won gets accidentally sidetracked into other areas by campaigning parents who rightly cry out loud because of neglect. It is appalling that the media should be used, because of the ineptitude of people responding or people who are deliberately deaf to what is going on, to shift the dial to a point where there could be perception that segregated education is best for all disabled people, and not specifically one set of disabled people. It took decades to get the Department of Education to agree that children with disabilities should be educated in their local schools, rather than in St. Mary's, Baldoyle, the Central Remedial Clinic or St. Joseph's School for the Blind. There is a danger that somehow, in the rightful arguing for a special place for children who might have autism, that could be swept up by planners who are not thinking or consulting, into a generality that segregated education is where people should go. Support for segregated education shifts could also mean that in the case of my grandson, for example, who has Down's syndrome, the speech therapy services he has access to in going to an inclusive school will be taken away, and his family will have to find the funds to pay for the therapy. The rightful response to the neglect and huge policy deficits has swept everything away along with it. There is an accidental shift behind it.