Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Good morning. I thank all of the witnesses for the presentations. I am the spokesperson on disability for Sinn Féin. I am not a member of this committee but I am a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. Every week I hear from people sharing their lived experience. A lot of the issues being raised here today I have heard from those witnesses as well. I am a white female with short dark hair wearing a white jacket and a black top. I will leave out the age if that is okay.

An issue that is brought up with us regularly, and the witnesses have alluded to it here, is that the supports do not follow the person and they have to reapply every time. A disability passport has been brought up many times and I believe this would be a good idea. I come from the education sector. If one receives supports in primary school they automatically follow into second level school. Something similar needs to be happening here.

Reference was made to the attitude of employers. We are aware that in the public sector there is a quota of 3%, which will increase to 6%. The National Disability Authority, NDA, will monitor that. The NDA point out that career progression within the public sector is very poor and this will be looked at as well. Many people enter at clerical assistant level and do not progress. With regard to the private sector, I recently engaged with an employability service. They said that when they tried to get work experience for people with disabilities the attitude of one particular area was very poor. Do the witnesses have any ideas on how we actually change the mindset of employers on a large scale?

The witnesses also spoke about the reluctance, or the refusal, of companies to upgrade websites to be accessible, which is terrible. There are guidelines. Do these need to be reinforced and made stronger than just guidelines? Again, the NDA has looked at all of the local authorities' websites and the NDA graded them on how accessible they were. The NDA published these results on their website. The next thing they were getting calls from local authorities asking what they needed to do to improve in order to move up the rankings. When they were called out on how poor their website accessibility was they were willing to change. I am aware that this is a much bigger process when considering private companies but is there something that can be done there to incentivise them to improve?