Mr. Adam Harris:

I echo a lot of what Nem said in terms of addressing some of those concerns. From my point of view, on the question of whether we should review the Disability Act 2005 or legislate for an autism strategy, the important message is that there is room for both. I do not think we want to get into creating a schedule of rights for autistic people that is over and above those of other disabled people. It is more to recognise that there is a cohort of people where there are specific shared experiences and very significantly that there are shared barriers that clearly the existing disability apparatus has not been able to address.

There are a lot of analogies like that in the system already. We have a national youth strategy and we also have a youth LGBT strategy. If we go across the Departments we would be able to find many examples of that. I do not think it is about one or the other it is about complementarity and making sure they are complementary. That is why, for us, the sort of legislation we need, the Act that needs to come out of this process, is fundamentally quite a simple piece of legislation. It is a piece of legislation that requires an autism strategy, that sets out the terms of that strategy, and that critically places the voice of autistic people at the heart of that strategy. That is really what I suppose we would seek. There are very good examples of that. To give an example, the Autism Spectrum Disorder Bill in Malta finished life as the Autism Empowerment Act in Malta. It is a very simple piece of legislation that we can gain a lot from.

In terms of consultation, our organisation has taken a particular approach dating back as far as 2012 which has been that any effort to legislate for autism is something we want to talk about and we want to be in that room and shaping that conversation as much as possible. We certainly appreciated having the chance to speak to Deputies Canney and Naughten to outline the real strengths, where we see them, such as the piece on the strategy, and areas we would like further clarity on and amendment, such as the ones that have already been outlined.

On the community piece, it is really important. Increasingly we see, not just at an Irish level but at European and international levels, that there is this desire to pull the autism community apart and to question even the term "autism" and whether it is useful any more. We very much need to understand we are a community of people united in our diversity and in many respects we need to see that as a strength. There is already recognition, even within the diagnostic criteria for autism, that there are different levels of support within our community that evolve over the lifetime. A huge influence on people's experience is not just co-occurring diagnoses as we have already heard, but also those intersectional experiences. Autistic people are members of ethnic minorities, there are LGBT autistic people and so on. When we hear from autistic young people and autistic adults in terms of getting the autism diagnosis that often there is that moment of clarity, a sense of liberation and a sense of finding one's tribe. We are a community united in diversity and sometimes we are a community of people united in adversity as well. There is a shared experience there and there is a culture there, and like many communities a desire to take that back, remove the stigma and to own it. Being autistic is not a definition of an individual but it can be a very important identity just as we all have more than one identity in many respects.