Ms Eleanor McSherry:

At the autism taskforce in 2001 the strategy was written by the top experts in their field internationally and nationally. It was not only academics but also family members. This is why it is so soul destroying that I am in here 21 years later and very little has been done on it, even if over the years there has been a lot of will to implement it. It is a very meaty document. I could not even begin to outline it but there are a lot of very good recommendations in there. Some of them have been touched on such as intensive support programmes, ISPs. Every single strategy or policy that has come after has always come back to that document. We already have it. It is here and basically it was shelved. There is a lot of material in there.

The autism studies course we do is a two-year course. We have a waiting list. We are evaluating it at the moment and we constantly evaluate it. We give an online offering and we give an in-class offering for it in Cork and in Limerick. Our current waiting list to go onto the course is 120 people, but we only have 60 places. It caters to special needs assistants, teachers, disability officers, HSE nurses, intellectual disability nurses and, most important, parents. The fantastic thing about it is that it is not a postgraduate course; it is not disciplinary, it is interdisciplinary. The conversations in the room are fantastic because parents are learning from teachers and teachers are learning from parents.

Everybody comes out with an attitude. When I started teaching it ten years ago I was a lecturer on policy practice, law and representation and I came in with a position that there should be no institutionalisation at all but then from listening to intellectual disability nurses, people from Enable Ireland and people from Inclusion Ireland I heard that there is a place for every kind of intervention because some people will have difficulty living in the community. Baroness Warnock coined the term social inclusion and said that everybody should be socially included but she came back in the early 2000s and said that without resourcing and funding we are throwing people to the wolves. That is the difficulty with it.

The autism disability study is a fantastic programme and I am very proud of it. I am proud of our students because they go on to become leaders in their communities. We are empowering parents, who are able to stick up for themselves. That is why we created the advocacy course, which is a five-credit course that is a follow-on to that for anybody from youth and community work, mental health in the community, and we have a higher diploma in inclusion. I have a parent who is doing a master's in University College Galway on advocacy and international advocacy and she came into us as a carer who was never in education because she could not be in education. She has scraped together the funding to do this. I am very proud of the work we do in ACE. We are 75 years doing it and we are getting bigger and better all the time. I was told the other day that we are the world leader in this area. For Ireland and for us to be at this meeting and to be able to say that makes me proud of the work we do.