Mr. Peadar O'Dea:

Yes, I want to quickly address Deputy Higgins's points about examples of barriers to employment. I am visually impaired. I have a master's degree in disability studies obtained from the University of Leeds in 2017 and I am policy officer for a DPO, but as I said, because we currently do not have access to funding, neither I or anyone else in the organisation can get paid. We are all doing voluntary work, but we are putting in a huge amount of hours, especially Ms Madani. It is frustrating because we are told if we go into education and work hard we will achieve things, but unfortunately it does not happen much of the time if one is disabled. There is a big question around the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that seems to go into a lot of thinking, and not just in Ireland.

To address the Senator's points, I am hesitant to say Ireland is an outlier. I am most familiar with Ireland. I lived in the UK for four years. It has many of the same problems and they are somewhat magnified. The access to work programme was mentioned. In theory, it is great, but it has been slashed through austerity measures over the last 13 years. It is something to keep in mind that economic policy at a high level can have an impact on the day-to-day lives of disabled people. I am cautious about saying there is a shining international example we should be citing. I could point, for instance, to Sweden, which is doing some interesting stuff around personal assistance funding at a central level that seems good. However, I am sure if I went to Sweden I could find problems. I always held up Germany in my mind as a positive example, but after speaking to some friends from there who are disabled, they say once a person applies for social security there he or she is effectively legally barred from the employment market. That person is essentially segregated. What I am trying to say is there are pitfalls and pros and cons to everything.

I am cautious about saying Ireland is an outlier. There needs to be a mentality shift here. We have a kind of inferiority complex sometimes that we are inherently worse than every other country at everything. While there are many things Ireland is doing I do not like, I am certain I could find at least some of those things paralleled if I lived somewhere else. Ireland should have the mentality it could be a leader on disability rights. I do not see why not. We are supposedly one of the richest countries in the world. We always top the well-off indexes, or at least we rank in the top half of them. I do not buy the idea Ireland is inherently flawed. We could set standards. I will leave it there.