Ms Jacqui Browne:

I thank Deputy Cairns very much for her very insightful questions. I will talk to the committee about the capacity and resources of DPOs in general.

As the Deputy quite rightly identified, we are quite young in our genesis but an awful lot of us have been around a long time - some like myself a bit too long, maybe. We are working together and working very closely, which is great. However, every single one of us and all our members are volunteers. Even in preparing for today's meeting, we have come here to give of our time. Some people are missing university lectures, some are missing work and some are missing doing other things in their lives. This is our level of commitment but we cannot sustain it in the long term. First of all we need a national register of DPOs. Second, we need due recognition of DPOs under Article 4.3 and general comment 7 of the UNCRPD. We need to not only be recognised but resourced financially and otherwise, and not with piecemeal little bits of project funding. We need multi-annual funding. We need to have the confidence that we have sustainability. If we are talking about sustainable development goals, particularly given the nature of the work we do and the effort and time involved, there is no point giving us project funding for six months or a year. We need a guarantee that we can plan for, say, the next three years. We need to develop a work plan that is realistic, achievable and that can involve more and more disabled people and organisations for disabled people. We cannot do that on fresh air. I thank the Deputy for that question. It is important. We have called several times already for a national register of DPOs to be established properly. We see that responsibility as lying predominantly with the Department of Children, Disability, Equality, Integration and Youth in order to maintain that focus on the human rights-based approach and given its responsibility for the convention in general as the lead Department. I will hand over to Ms Hassett to address the research question because she is very well placed to answer that in her personal role as a member of the DPO Network. The DPO Network has never formally been approached to engage with the third level sector.