Ms Shelly Gaynor:

As a peer mentor, I am sick to death hearing from very young, articulate and educated people who have gone through to get their masters in whatever they desire to do. They have full-on support while in college - if they need 24-hour care they get it. Then they go to the real world, the world we all live in, and I am told they are suicidal. They legitimately are because we dangle a carrot in front of them for three or four years while they are in college in order that they will study and get their qualifications. Then they leave college, as Mr. Walshe said, and they end up coming across me or ILMI. I literally do not know what to say to them. If someone gets PA during college life, that should stay with them. What benefit is it to go to college, to get a degree or a master's and then go home and disappear? A PA service is about freedom, choice and control but then some people are not able to go outside their own front door because their mother is in her 60s or 70s. It does not really match up. We are giving people the wrong impression. I have often said to Mr. Walshe that I am beginning to hate third level education because it gives disabled people the wrong impression in that the real world will not give them what they get in college. We need to get real. A PA service is not about getting someone up in the morning; it is about giving someone a quality of life in order that they can live and not just exist. That is what it is about.

Today, we have heard a lot about personal care and what people need. The HSE says it is not into standardisation because it is into individuals. That is great to hear. In reality, however, we need to standardise PA services because if I live in Donegal or Dublin, there might be a different level of service and level of hours. It is really about hours. That is what disabled people care about. We do not care about the service. We care about freedom, hours, choice and control. Everybody else involved with matters relating to disabled people seems to care about the service, but we care about what is on the ground. Five hours a day or five hours a week is not living; it is existing. We need to get real. If we are going to say that X body is going to deliver a PA service, we need to know what that will mean. As Mr. Kenny stated, the HSE needs to make that very clear. If it is going to give a load of money to service providers to offer a service, then let us get real about what a PA service involves. That is why ILMI is calling for standardisation of the PA service. It is too much like pot luck. I have three people I am working with in Donegal, and there is no service for them. They are told they will get a PA service but if they say, as Mr. Walshe mentioned, that they want to go to the pub or the cinema, they are told the service does not cover that. If we really care about the UNCRPD, human rights and disabled people's rights, let us get real about what a PA service is. There is too much medicalisation; we need to work on the social model. Every human being should be able to get out of bed. Every human being should have the right to get washed. Every human being should have the right to wear what they want to wear and eat when they want to eat, not when the service that is called a PA allows them to do so.