Mr. John Sherwin:

I thank Mr. Rainey for acknowledging the point about opportunities for individuals to come forward and then expecting a response as presenting difficulties. From our work in the Irish Deaf Society, deaf people are often intimidated going into a large forum of hearing people. I am sure it is the same for other disabled people; it can be an intimidating experience. Often, that puts individuals off. That is the role of DPOs. I would like to draw attention to a comment in our submission about PPNs and the fact that they invite membership from local organisations or national organisations with local offices.

At the moment that is not the way underfunded and small DPO organisations work. We have a number of network members who are small organisations in Dublin and do not have the capacity to have offices in local communities around the country so we end up being excluded from these structures.

A recent example is Ms Elaine Grehan who is at this meeting; she travelled around the country gathering information from local deaf communities for a strategic plan. It is obvious that these communities are very isolated and many of them called for local clinics from ourselves to support them but we do not have the resourcing or the office space to do that. There is a huge resource building required here. We are calling for specific, proactive DPO inclusion plans at local government level as part of their strategies rather than just opportunities for communities to participate. That would align with legal responsibilities public bodies have under the public sector duty on equality and human rights and they would be ticking a number of boxes by getting involved in work like that. We would like to be in a position to contribute. We hope to get the resourcing to be able to contribute effectively. I want to draw the committee's attention to a recent National Disability Authority, NDA, publication entitled "Participation Matters". It was supported and contributed to by DPO organisations and it is a guideline on implementing the obligation to meaningfully engage with disabled people in public decision-making. The DPO Network supports this document and it is something that would be great to see all local authorities, bodies and State organisations really studying in detail and seeing if they can live up to the principles that are outlined in that document.