Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely. Some children love routine and crave it. If some of the campuses the Cathaoirleach spoke about, which have some wonderful facilities, were accessible and if we could build them into the routine of families, or build them into the opportunities available for personal assistants whereby they could bring an individual to them, this is what we need to be looking at. I compliment the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, and his predecessor with responsibility for sport, Deputy Chambers, with regard to the sports capital fund. Disability had a 25% weighting in it and community had the rest. To be honest, when the Department with responsibility for sport looks at how sports capital funding is spent it looks to see how accessible and inclusive the community organisation is and how disability-proofed it is. It has gone from being just a letter of support to being a licensed service agreement. The licensed service agreement has a value, and organisations would not get funding unless they had entered into such an arrangement.

I have met a number of organisations that I would like to bring back to a few conversations on this. When disabled citizens ask for letters of support, they have currency because organisations would not be getting the funding without them. It is the same way in which without women and girls the organisations would not be getting the funding either. There is currency that needs to be leveraged, and rightly so, in the context of what the Cathaoirleach said. Disabled people and young people would like the slots from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. in these organisations. It should not mean they get the slots as the light gets dim or the poor Sunday evening slot when everybody else is going home. We need to have real inclusion and real integration.

Earlier, I was asked to name a good Department. This is a classic example of a good Department that understands how we do inclusion and integration with the UNCRPD. It is delivering it through its framework for how sports capital funding is rolled out. We need to be using more of our facilities, most of which are paid for by the State.