Dr. Rosalyn Tamming:

Senator Clonan may have seen that we launched a report with the ESRI yesterday. Historically, since 2001, we did a national attitudes to disability survey and have repeated it every five years up to 2017. It had shown generally that attitudes were fairly good but we know that the lived experience of people with disabilities was that maybe attitudes were not so good. We therefore questioned whether the mechanism by which we were collecting data was really giving a true picture of attitudes. Obviously, attitudes lead to discrimination. We therefore asked the ESRI to look at the approach we were using and the institute used an experimental approach to try to gauge whether people were hiding their true opinions. That can be done in a certain way the questions are asked. We found that when anonymity was given to people in answering a question, they showed more discrimination than when they had to be more open about their views. The difference was not huge, and the message overall from the report was that there are still, in general, high levels of positivity, particularly towards policy areas that might improve the lives of people with disabilities. Then again, support was seen to drop, as was said, when it was stated that it may cost more in taxes or that resources would have to be taken from elsewhere. It was a very interesting study. It highlights the importance of measuring attitudes but also puts the caveats around how they are measured in that maybe they are not showing a true picture, so it has to be looked at in a lot of different ways.

The Central Statistics Office, CSO, does periodic surveys on discrimination in general, on all equality grounds. The last one, I think, was in 2019, and people with disabilities definitely experienced quite a lot of discrimination. We would like to see that improve over time. One of the things the report yesterday and lots of other literature have shown is the contact theory. People who know somebody with a disability, particularly if they know them well, have much more positive attitudes than people who do not know anyone with a disability. Then you move that on and wonder who the people who do not know someone with a disability are, because they make up 13% of the population currently. The proportion will probably be higher when we get the census findings next month. We need to make sure that people with disabilities are more visible in society in order that they are not living in segregated settings, they are not going to school in a segregated way and they have access to employment. It all leads up then to better attitudes and reduced discrimination, in theory.