Mr. James Casey:

I thank the Deputy for the question about representation. The simple answer is all Departments, although perhaps not the Department of Defence, must engage with organisations for disabled persons. I stress "real" DPOs. There is gaslighting going on in the language about rights and equality from large charities and service providers. That is because they know they are the buzzwords of the day.

Ireland ratified the UNCRPD on the rights of disabled people. This is law now. As Deputy Mythen said, there should be a DPO representative on the board. There is not a DPO representative even on the National Disability Authority. They were put forward but there is no representative of a DPO. We need to have that authentic voice there. I accept that we are not the only one. There is Disabled Women Ireland, the National Platform of Self Advocates, and other ones too. It is important that they are in those spaces.

I keep going back to it. We have industry driving policy that drives rights, which drive equality, and that cannot continue. It is not value for money. It is not good for disabled people, my friends or my collective. It is not good for us because it does not create equality. It just keeps the wheel going. We must look at value for money and ask why we are not empowering disabled people with their own choices, rather than giving the choices for us to someone else?

The media is doing that. The Government must stop outsourcing our lives. The media play a large part in that but not all of them. There are good people in RTÉ who are working with us, helping us and listening to us. It is not just because they are listening to us; they get what we are doing. More often than not, the narrative is driven by industry. That is why we are still unequal. It could be depressing, but it is also inspiring that we could meet the challenge. We definitely need to have DPO representatives in every Department or at least a process in place. We are more than open to talk to anybody. We would talk to the dogs in the street. We do not care. We could have that function and be a conduit for disabled people's voices. That is all we do. We do not make anything up. We just get what we get from them, and we put it onto a nice piece of paper for everyone to read and that is it.