Dr. Aideen Hartney:

A lot of what Senator Seery Kearney is talking about relates to attitudes and willingness to accept and recognise disabled people as rights holders, and to getting that message out across public bodies. We carried out research in 2019 on cases taken to the WRC in respect of reasonable accommodations and found that where employers had been found against, it was often because they had not gone through a due process of thinking about a reasonable accommodation or discussing it with the person. The reasonable accommodation process is very much envisaged as a partnership process between the employee and the employer, and that attitude could be more pervasive.

There is probably a range of possible mechanisms, relating to monitoring, showing good practice or having the availability of guidance and additional funding for supports where required, and the enforcement mechanisms would necessarily come at the end. If we could get to a stage where the attitudes were positive and that kind of bias and prejudice we sometimes see could be addressed at an earlier stage, we might not get to the stage of needing enforcement-----