Ms Derval McDonagh:

To build on Eliona's point about the flexible and multiple ways we should be trying to reach people and support people, and going back to the point Una and I made in our opening statement about these definitions in terms of people who are "hard to reach", which is an easy way of letting ourselves off the hook, we need to ask ourselves time and again who is not at the table and why, and make every effort to make sure those individuals are included.

Senator McGreehan asked about the consequences of not having people included or not consulting people. The consequences are devastating. We have entire groups of people throughout the country. I would speak from my experience of who we at Inclusion Ireland speak to and who we interact with every day. There are thousands of people living at home with family members for decades longer than they should have to without ever having a hope or a chance of moving out into a home of their own and having their own front-door key because there is simply no plan. A couple of our members said recently that these individuals are not hard to reach; they are easy to ignore. They are not in policy. There is no plan. That is incredibly soul-destroying for those individuals and for the families who were looking forward to a time when life would move on, as it does. We all expect life to move on. You enter your 20s or 30s and you put in place for your own life. That is not happening for many people with intellectual disabilities as a direct result of being easy to ignore, and that has to be addressed.

Included in those individuals also have to be the people who are living in institutions right now who are incredibly easy to ignore, often behind high walls and not seen and not heard. There is a lot of work to be done to make sure those individuals' voices are heard. Obviously, through representative organisations, advocacy organisations and NGOs, such as ourselves, we need to continue to amplify that voice and make sure there are ways and mechanisms to hear those individuals' voices. We are seeing the stagnation of deinstitutionalisation - we spoke about that recently at a committee - because we are not hearing those voices. That is having devastating consequences on people.

Returning to Deputy Cairns's question about resources and the time it takes, we need to get real about this. There are individuals who need a lot of support, and that is fine. They do and they need tailored, targeted and individualised supports. That is perfectly okay. We need to get as many of the barriers removed as possible, as Nem has pointed out, in terms of universal design and making sure we are not repeatedly putting the onus and the burden on people's individual shoulders. However, there are people who need individualised supports to access their rights as well and we need to take that seriously and resource that. We are doing some work at the moment around self-advocacy in the Sligo and north-west region and it is taking a considerable amount of time to build the relationship with the individuals with intellectual disabilities who have been so marginalised and oppressed for so long and so left out of these conversations. It takes time to build that trust. It takes time to build that relationship. It takes time to bring everybody to the table, not only speaking people but people who are non-speaking and people who need all sorts of resources to speak up, and build that relationship so that people can eventually be in shared spaces with other disabled activists as well and be an equal participant in those shared spaces. There is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done at a community level for that to happen and we cannot underestimate the investment in that. The consequences of not doing this properly are seeing the continuation of institutionalisation and the continuation of people living at home with their families with no chance of moving out into a home of their own and us not hearing the most important voices in all of this.