Ms Eleanor McSherry:

It is a grey area. I do not know if the Chair knows this already, but if one applies for the grant for education, it has to be for a certain criterion or type of course. If it is a short course, they can forget about it because they will not get any funding. It has to be a diploma or a certificate at a level 6, which is what our course is. They have to apply for it, and they will get the funding after they do the course. Therefore, the parent has to come up with the funding before they start. Our course at the moment costs approximately €1,200, which is a lot of money for a carer. For a carer who may be working a couple of hours, it is a lot of money, especially in light of the way finance has gone.

We are self-funding, therefore, all our courses have to be paid for. That money pays for the lectures, the marketing and everything. We are therefore not like the rest. For a student who is going through education as an undergraduate, their fees will be paid partially by the Government, but we do not get that kind of funding and we cannot apply for it because we are not a charity. We are therefore in a grey area within the funding mechanisms that are there for carers, if they are not on welfare and are not full-time carers.

I was not a carer and was €50 over the threshold so we never got carer’s allowance. I went back to further education, and I funded myself through that as an adult learner. I did not go into education through the traditional model. I found that we just made do. That is what we had to do. My husband was a teacher, so we were supposed to be in the "higher-paid echelons". That is what I am told every day, that we are in the middle classes, and that we are funding the whole country. That used to disgust me because I never asked for anything. I never asked for anything, and I was never entitled to half of anything. I did get a domiciliary care allowance, before the committee members go checking and out me.

It is important that we recognise that we might not get job advances, but it is a springboard if I want to get another job. However, it is a matter of whether I want to improve, and if I want to be aware of training for neurodiversity, like what we are doing for the screen industry. While the screen industry is paying for that, it is paying for 20 students, but let us say that there are 60 students. We have an Irish student who is living in America, and who is a director. He wants to do our course from America. We have created the course so that it is recorded, so that he can come in at any time because we need to see more people who are autistic on our television screens. We need to see representation because what we see on our screens is an issue that I have not seen any of the committee members speak about so far.

We have only ever had two autistic characters in the history of Irish television. If I cannot see somebody like myself, how the hell am I going to walk around in the community? I have seen loads of documentaries and sad stories. I have seen it in the news. That content is there but we do not have content in drama or autistic actors and directors. They are there but they are afraid to say who they are. That is why we are trying to change that narrative. We are educating within industry. We are now starting a course for human resources for people such as managers, in particular in the pharmaceutical industry, because they know people who are autistic or neurodiverse are working there. They are already employing them but these people are leaving the job rather than staying in it because the conditions are so bad for them. To be able to change the culture we have without outing anybody is the way to go.