Nem Kearns:

Yes, I fully support that. What Ms McDonagh said earlier about moving from consultation to participation and co-creation really is the map we should be using. We should be moving to an ongoing conversation. A lot of these issues are complex and nuanced.

In my previous response, I forgot to highlight another issue that is crucially important. In its most recent report, Aligning Disability Services with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the committee highlighted certain techniques and therapies used on disabled people, in particular autistic young people. These behavioural intervention techniques are expanding to be used on people with intellectual disabilities and deaf people. These techniques are compliance training and teaching disabled people to accept whatever an outside authority does to them, both physically and mentally, and teaching them learned helplessness, that they have no voice. I want to put on the record that in order to promote self-advocacy and empowerment for disabled people, we need to stop teaching them that their voice does not matter at the youngest age. We need to stop teaching them that compliance is the ultimate goal of their lives. We also need to teach children at a young age that their advocacy matters and their views matter. That goes for all children, not just disabled children. We also need to teach non-disabled children about disability issues because when people become adults and have a lifetime behind them of viewing disabled people as other, niche or strange it is too late.

On consultation, an access officer would definitely be a helpful first step. Ongoing conversation as opposed to discrete consultation is absolutely necessary. We also need support. We need to look at consultation in the home in the round. For example, our members have put their hands in their pockets to the tune of thousands of euro to pay for transport to consultations and access needs for consultations. Again, it is the lack of joined-up thinking about the reality of disabled people's lives. We will talk about how half of disabled people struggle to access public transport and then we want them to go to a consultation in Citywest. There are also the practical issues. For example, if disabled people rely on public transport to get to a consultation, a bus will take only one wheelchair user. How many wheelchair users will be able to turn up? Will they have to start queueing from midnight the night before? We need to support people to get to consultations by providing information and transport.

There is also the removal of hybrid or remote options. This has really impacted disabled people's ability to participate. We learned how to do it. That was one of the good things to come out of recent years. We need to keep that. That is all I want to say. I support what people have already said on it but emphasise we need to be moving to conversations as opposed to isolated one-off consultations every few years.

There is something else I would like to see. What we are seeing, particularly for disabled women, is even more falling through the gaps. I would like to call for strategies on a national level dealing with women's issues or gender-based issues to automatically have to include high-level targets ensuring equality for disabled women.

I would like to see national strategies for disabled people having to include high-level gender-based targets. Almost none of them do. There are entire strategies on women that do not mention disability. There are entire strategies on disability that do not mention women. There is an assumption that will come out in the wash and be worked out in the detail, but it is not. To show our commitment to equality for disabled women, we need to be putting that at the highest level and showing we see it as a high-level priority.