Ms Fleachta Phelan:

Those are very easy and straightforward questions from Deputy Ó Cuív. It will not be difficult to answer those at all. I thank him. There were some positive elements of the Green Paper and there were some aspects of it which, possibly, got dumped into the broader discussion. Deputy Ó Cuív described the difference between, for example, the invalidity pension, disability allowance and the partial capacity benefit and whether people should move across to partial capacity benefit. There are questions around whether a person is taxable in that regard. We know the blind pension is taxable, etc.

In the context of the consistent method, the system is extraordinarily complicated to understand for everyone, including for those of us who work in it day in, day out. Potentially, the proposal of making a more systemic and consistent system for people without the anomalies was a positive one. To what extent it would fully address all of the anomalies, I do not know. There are a lot of issues around the invalidity pension and I know Ms Porter has a couple of points to make in that regard as well.

As to the point that the Department of Social Protection hates self-employed people, we have a fairly elaborate submission on the Green Paper which highlights a lot of the issues. The issue of self-employment is a really important one because, sometimes, it offers more flexibility as a way of generating income for people who have fluctuating conditions or for people who may have more flexible working hours as a result. We just seem to assume that disabled people will not be entrepreneurs or be self-employed. As Deputy Ó Cuív may have heard, this issue also comes up in a set of other contexts. For example, grants from the Arts Council received by disabled artists are counted and considered means. They are therefore, financially, in a difficult situation. This issue has come up around the universal basic income for the arts. There have been issues with PhD stipends and this continues to be an issue. Our member organisation, AHEAD, brought up with me the fact that, sometimes, PhD students are treated as employees by the university they are in and that there is a €20,000 cut-off of the disregard which was brought in.

The medical card issue was discussed earlier. When the caring organisations were speaking to good practice, they were pointing to countries which have much better healthcare provision and that makes a huge difference.

On the cost of disability itself, I was searching for good examples to which I could point in our submission, but I found it really difficult to find any good international examples. There are certainly better provisions and that is why we have focused on some aspects which we think addressing can start to do that. The speaker from the OECD, who spoke at the Green Paper event in Dublin, was very clear in his communication that a costed disability payment is needed as it is the fairest and best way to address things. Part of the reason that the continuous ask has been a flat rate of payment so far is for the very reason Deputy Ó Cuív is bringing up, that is, it is very difficult to do the individual assessments. I do not think it is impossible. There is a lot of international guidance on how the assessments should be done. Part of the negative reaction to the proposal was the extent to which a medical model seemed to be very much inherent in the Green Paper approach. In areas where we are doing assessments, people should be able to speak about their own needs and the structural barriers that are impeding them from working or participating. There are guidelines from the International Labour Organization, ILO, on assessments and there are also recommendations from the UNCRPD committee itself. It would be possible. There is also a substantial amount of data in the Indecon report itself which we do not tend to look at. Ms Porter has the specific figures for Huntington's disease. There are broken-down pieces of information on the specific kinds of disabilities and the relative impacts of those. We do not have to go completely back to the drawing board but it has to be done in a fair, inclusive and participatory manner and be based on the principles on independent living and vindicating people's right to an adequate standard of living.

I wish to refer back to the piece on employment. It makes no financial sense, from the State's point of view, at a time when we keep saying we are at full employment, to be preventing a substantial cohort of people from working, many of whom wish to work but are prevented because of those structural barriers such as the lack of services or the risks which we have been discussing. If we were to support and enable those people to go to work, more money would come back to the State by way of income tax. If we were to provide some of those services and not means-test them to the extent we are, it would not be substantial and the money and revenue people earn would come back into the community. It just does not make any logical sense, even from a purely financial point of view, to put those limits in. I am sure I have not tackled everything. Ms Porter may have a few points.