Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

As I have said in reply to other members, I want the optional protocol ratified and to see that route towards the vindication of rights if those rights have not been fulfilled in Ireland or I want at least the opportunity to highlight them that the individual complaints mechanism provides. We do have sets of remedies here. The core one is through the courts, which is difficult and can be expensive and time consuming. As I said earlier, unfortunately, too many parents have felt that they had to go through the courts to secure services or advancements for their children. We have seen the courts address issues raised by parents. They have made changes and forced Governments and agencies to make changes as a result of court decisions. There is a mechanism there but I do not underestimate the challenges in accessing that mechanism. There is also equality legislation under which people can take actions. I do not know if the Senator heard "Morning Ireland" earlier where a gentleman spoke about how he had been discriminated against when he was not allowed to bring his guide dog into a restaurant. There are mechanisms there for people to use the Equality Acts and there are provisions under the Disability Act as well specifically for people with disabilities in terms of access. We have a range of remedies at domestic level but that is not to take away from the importance of having that individual complaint mechanism open to us.

It is the intention that the new disability strategy, like the existing one, will have a new oversight committee that will probably meet on a quarterly basis and will examine the progress that Departments and agencies are making in their outcomes. That works reasonably well as a system. The benefit of the current disability strategy, and hopefully of the next one, is the external evaluation by the NDA. That is something that we do not have in some of the other equality strategies. The oversight group monitors it but we also have external monitoring as well. I want that to continue as well because it gives a belt-and-braces approach in terms of the outcomes.

I take the point about collaboration of local authorities. One provision we introduced in the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) (Amendment) Act was to increase the public service employment obligation. It is 3% at the moment and it will increase to 6% by 2025. That will put pressure on all State agencies, authorities and Departments to increase the number of people with disabilities that they employ. That is important. It will also apply to local authorities. The requirement currently is 3%. I brought the report for 2021 to the Cabinet some weeks ago. We were achieving 3.5% so there is still a jump to be made.

For a number of years this figure had being going down and we were getting closer to 3%. In 2021 we saw this figure go up to 3.6%, which was a 0.5% increase. This was a small step in the right direction but there will be a challenge on everybody to get us up to 6% by the end of 2025.