Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 13 December 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Autism

Autism Policy and Employment: Discussion

Mr. Peter Brabazon:

Annually, we get close to €1 million. We are a bit over €1 million turnover in total for this year. There is one group of people we employ as contractors who are autistic and we normally do not include them in our income stream, but if we do, we are at the €1 million mark. Where does it come from? Two thirds of it comes from the State or the EU and one third comes from fees earned in different ways. We offer different services. Obviously, the main service is the employment service, but we do coaching, mentoring and so on. Awareness is a big thing for us too, going back to Ms O'Connor's point about communications. How does it come to us? We were very lucky, more or less in the same year Mr Murphy joined us, to gain a three-year support from Pobal, which was, I think, 50% funded by the European Social Fund, ESF. That really got us growing. We have depended on that for growth and we grew dramatically. As a social charity, we have grown but every year we spend a lot of time making additional applications. We do not lead in any European applications. We have just a partner in our first one in Europe directly. Pobal has a very thorough process but it is fair. From our point of view, it has worked out very well.

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