Ms Maria Gleeson-Cary:

Regarding the community access aspect, there are really no limits to the ambitions of autistic people. They deserve the right to be able to access all the community supports everyone else does and to be treated with understanding and respect.

That requires that level of training and that overall strategic planning from a Government and local authority level. As my colleagues said, we have fantastic awareness campaigns at the moment but it is about stepping up now. We have a lovely playground and there are lovely examples of inclusivity across the country but we really need to be more strategic and the training needs to be more strategic. The courts system, the Garda and our health service need more support in terms of training on universal design. We need our local authorities to have a range of housing opportunities available to support autistic adults as a lifelong approach. We need more accessible documents across the board from all parts of the community for people to be able to actually thrive and feel safe in their communities and to live independently as part of their communities and in their homes.