Ms Siobhán McKenna:

I could not agree more with Senator Flynn on having disabled people at the table. Over the last year, we have worked very closely with Sinéad Burke's consultancy Tilting the Lens to co-design a process with some of our disabled colleagues in the Civil Service and also outside the Civil Service to see how things are done differently in the private sector in this area. We had over 100 people feed into this process. Some were disabled and some were not. Some were managing people with disability and some were not. It involved the public sector and Civil Service. We had to centre the voice of persons with a disability because they are the experts in their disability and the experts in their reasonable accommodation. That seems like a no-brainer because designing anything without that input, which happens all the time, as has been said, seems pointless to us. We spent six months consulting. There were some very difficult conversations and sessions at which colleagues were in tears about their experience in the Civil Service and public sector, which I was unprepared for, frankly. The trauma helped us come up with a really good set of guidelines which is all about supporting the disabled person and recognising that each disabled person is unique. We speak about them like they are a homogenous group but they are not. We have seen a shift from physical disabilities to the neurodivergent but also mental health issues. For example, 40% of the reasonable accommodation requests we get are from the neurodiverse people who need support, whether they have dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome or whatever. That is a shift from years ago when people sought to have an accessible building because most buildings are now accessible.