Dr. James Casey:

I will respond to Senator Clonan and will bring in Mr. McGrath, who is itching to say something. We do need to engage with the social model because we have not engaged with it. Ireland went from the medieval period right through to enlightenment. We did not go near the Renaissance. I am from the west. I can tell the Senator that for the truth. We have not engaged. We went from a medical model, which did not happen, to full-on equality so let us engage with the social model and get that frame of thinking and the human rights model flow from that. Why is that? I will be honest with the Senator. It is because of money. If you go down any street in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oulu, Kuopio or Amsterdam, you will not see a plethora of disability services charity shops. You do not see fun runs for impairments. There is a lot of money involved in disability. The Senator knows that. I have seen his frustration over trying to get his son's future fixed but that is not from investment. It is like "where is that money going?" The figure last year was €2.37 billion last year but I have not seen it.

Two conversations are happening. There is one about what disabled people need and want and there is the one about what disabled people are getting and it is not us who are having part of that conversation. This is not to deride any of that work but it does not happen in any other section of society. Where is that coming from? It is coming from the majority of service providers, large charities and religious orders and we know how well that served the country. We have gone from that to a different section where they are providing services and putting in a frame of equality and all that kind of crack but we need to scratch the surface. Again, it comes down to money, money, money and there is a lot of money. Where money is involved, power is involved and where power is involved, somebody is not going to give that up easily.

Thirty-three percent of disabled people in this country are at work. Why is that? I work with a lot of young disabled people and have seen them bloom over the years. The Senator met a few of them at the book launch. They have this frustration but because they are more connected, they see disability as identity but they also see it as something they collectively actively work on and they can see things can change. This is the great last barrier to equality in this country. We have had the women's health referendum and the LGBT+ marriage referendum. This is something that needs to be dealt with because we are not dealing with it properly. A function of this is consulting with DPOs so let us go back to creating a register of DPOs and creating the attributes of DPOs and a mechanism to talk to them.