Mr. Dualta Roughneen:

I will. I hope she can listen back. The use of the marker is one step and only a partial step. There is a danger in markers as well. They are useful for gathering information. There are many markers at the moment. When we receive Irish Aid funding, we have to fill out a lot of markers as well. There is a risk that people try to make their work become all singing, all dancing. They are trying to tick the box around climate change, gender, disaster, risk reduction, adaptation, and disability is another one. There is a risk of regression to the mean to an extent. Sometimes it is targeted, specific programmes that need to be done. I understand the need to do this but there is a risk that much of the work will become very samey, so to speak. The organisations will start doing similar work and we will then miss out on that targeted, sometimes very specific, work that needs clinical expertise as well. I mean clinical in a general sense rather than medical. We find as an organisation, in looking at the funding landscape, not just Irish Aid but looking abroad as well, that there so many boxes that need to be ticked that we look at our strategy and think donors will not want to fund us unless we can say we have climate change expertise, gender expertise and another expertise. That means we cannot resource in the disability inclusion expertise we really need. We cannot prioritise it.

That is why I would always be concerned that everybody wants everything to be ticked. For Senator McGreehan, I would love to see all the work and all of Irish Aid's funding being disability inclusive. It is one of our objectives as an organisation to support some of the larger NGOs such as Concern and Trócaire to ensure their work becomes disability inclusive as well, but it is not easy for them because they have other priorities. I feel Mr. Gaffey's pain sometimes around the Better World policy. I could not say whether organisations for people with disabilities were included in some of the discussion. They potentially were, but ultimately there are so many demands for everybody wanting to get their priorities in there. There is the hunger priority and the conflict.

Mr. Gaffey talked about the nexus, which is a relatively new language in international development where humanitarian work and development work overlap. It is not new in practice; it is just a new way of speaking about it. There are areas like Niger and Burkina Faso where you try to make progress around system development or, if you are working on education, around inclusive education.

In such circumstances, you are also responding to core humanitarian needs where there are no schools for children to attend. You are setting up tented schools and trying to make them accessible, or trying to train up teachers rapidly to teach in a way that ensures children with disabilities can be included. It is very difficult. The language can be nice but the practice of doing it is not so easy. There is no simple solution that we can give. Markers help to point that direction but they definitely do not solve it. Markers are great but it is important to get a targeted focus on disability inclusion work as well so it does not fall as a general approach. The general approach is hugely important but sometimes people with disabilities have specific needs and need specific supports to be able to access their rights here and now as well. There is a long-term gain around societal, attitudinal and cultural changes when people with disabilities in some of the places we work are not hidden away in the background. In my previous role we did research in Togo and Guinea. We were working in schools where 1% of children in schools might have had some form of disability. In reality, we know that levels of disability would be 10% or 11% at a minimum so where were all the other children? They were not getting to school. They were not even visible in their communities. They were hidden away, sometimes in institutions. We are looking to see how we can work specifically and enable those children to go to schools while ensuring the education system is open for them to access. Then they can learn and they do not simply go to school and feel like they are sitting there when sometimes they regress further in their education.