Mr. R?n?n Hession:

To add to Mr. Maher’s first point, Senator McGreehan earlier asked about the reasonable accommodation fund. The assistive technology that people get under that is theirs to bring to their new job. There is probably a widescale misunderstanding about that. It is part of the problem we have with that scheme. People do not understand how it works and that is reflected in the very low take-up. We are reviewing that and the review is pretty much complete at this stage. We just need to bring the Minister through it and get her agreement to it. That will be coming forward soon.

We looked at the UK. The UK has a much bigger scheme but there is much we can copy from it. There was a very good summit in Belfast last September, I think, called the Harkin Summit. Senator Harkin brought in the US’s disability equality Act. It was a huge international summit with participants from around the world. Everyone has struggled with participation rates. Ours is 36.5% or thereabouts. We are aiming for 38%. The OECD average is about 40%, so we are a way off that. Some of that it is that there are slow exits from disability allowance to employment but also it is a percentage. In other words, our labour force increased enormously so the percentage shift is a mathematical thing. The Leas-Cathaoirleach is right that the participation rate is too low, the poverty rate is too high and the cost of disability is too high. We cannot stay where we are.

In terms of the technology, certainly it can travel. On the access to work, we are trying to take what we can and learn so we can make it much more user-friendly. The Leas-Cathaoirleach made another point but I did not take a note of it.

One of the things in respect of the passporting and why it is helpful that ICTU and IBEC are doing it is that there are 645,000 or thereabouts disabled people, only a fraction of whom are on our payments. Something that comes up is whether we have a tendency to think of disability in social welfare terms but most people who have a disability have a work history and are working. There are good prospects with the right supports. That is part of what the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, is about. It is about society changing rather than just relying on the individual changing.