Ms Lucianne Bird:

Professor Flynn has covered many of the issues around a future system and we concur with everything she said. Moving away from the medical model of incapacity to work would be important. The coupling of secondary benefits presents people with a significant barrier. Covering the cost of disability has to be treated as a universal payment or, if people are working, as a tax offset. Regarding durations, someone's disability does not disappear just because he or she has worked for three years, as Mr. Meere said. Looking at the matter in this way is important. Attendance on the first steps should not be incentivised. We should not make it prohibitive for people to attend training or development courses. To build on Ms Hughes's point, our training is more than just the course. It is about building back the person. It is an holistic approach. It is not training in the vein of a mainstream or FET programme. Rather, it is training plus, and the "plus" is very much concerned with the person and what he or she needs in order to be confident, ready and resilient enough to go into the workplace or enter his or her community. This is an important consideration.

We have some experience of social farming and have done some development work on training schemes that would be more appropriate to rural areas. We run very well-subscribed and powerful horticultural programmes in our centres, including our rural centres. There is a fabulous such programme in Park House in Dublin. People find the combination of the programmes' therapeutic effects, the fresh air, working on practical things, learning skills and being able to translate those into their own lives powerfully. This is an area for further exploration and development, particularly in rural communities, and we would be happy to look into that. We are also happy to take away the Cathaoirleach's request to consider what changes could be made to the system. We will revert with succinct proposals in that regard.