Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests. I apologise in advance that I am not going to be able to stay for the whole session. I have another commitment. I will, however, review the proceedings when I get back to my office.

This is an issue on which we are engaged and hope to remain engaged on. I will take my lead from our guests, and this is not something we normally do, by saying I am a 49-year-old woman with long brown hair wearing a navy suit. It would not even have occurred to me to do even a simple thing such as that. It is not an unwillingness to do the right thing but is the result of a lack of basic knowledge. When it is pointed out, bad and all as we are, we can usually try to do better.

I will touch briefly on the commission report from 2022. Ireland has the largest disability employment gap in the European Union, which is not something of which we should be at all proud. It is not a league table we want to be top of. That is one of those league tables we want to be at the very bottom of. I will ask about the low employment rates by comparison with other EU states. What is being done elsewhere that we are either not doing or not doing enough of? Reference was made in Ms McDonagh's submission to the British access to work scheme. Perhaps we could hear a little more about that. We should not be about the business of reinventing the wheel. If people in another place are doing something right or better and if they have encountered and got past the pitfalls involved, we should learn from what they are doing, take the best bits and move on. Perhaps our guests could speak a little about where other people are getting it right and how we would be able to emulate them.