Mr. Padraig Hannafin:

I want to come back to the issue of career guidance. Recently Rehab made a submission on lifelong guidance. We carried out a number of focus groups among some of our students in our national learning network. There needs to be an attempt to instil confidence among some students to realise there are opportunities out there for them despite their disability. A key area where they feel they need support is to have specific career guidance counsellors who are trained with regard to disability. They feel that having to go to a guidance counsellor who does not have any experience of disability and explain very personal intimate elements of their disability was dehumanising and demoralising. If career guidance counsellors were specifically trained on disabilities they could highlight to the students the opportunities that are there. Many of the people we spoke to felt there was no point in progressing to third level education. They wondered what was the point in going through four years of a degree course if there were no opportunities for employment for a person with a disability afterwards.