Mr. John Sherwin:

Those are very good questions. I do not think we have all the answers. We are working with the Department of equality at the moment to co-create the national disability strategy, of which employment is a very important aspect. Our opening statement refers to the difficulties faced by disabled people and deaf people regarding introduction to self-employment. This starts with education and confidence building. In our opening statement, we edited out elements about raising the expectations of parents of disabled children and of disabled people themselves and the role of DPOs in society. We have a career project for deaf people and we had to develop awareness within the deaf community of the word "career" because people only understood "job" and "career" was a foreign concept to them. There is a lot of work to be done.

Disabled people face a glass ceiling in terms of jobs and advancing in jobs. There is no really meaningful engagement with DPOs about this, or data that we can work from. We can consult the census data and get disaggregated data for particular data points related to this but there needs to be a much higher level of engagement with us in order that we can try to solve these problems. One of the points we talk about here is funding and supports for disabled people working from home and entering into self-employment.

A huge confidence-building and capacity-building exercise needs to happen there as well. We have no doubt that disabled people and deaf people can be self-employed, work from home, run commercial entities and achieve things. The majority of our staff in the Irish Deaf Society are deaf. All our senior managers are deaf. The majority of our board are deaf. Since the Covid pandemic, our staff have been working in a hybrid fashion, from home and in the office, which allows us to have more staff than we can fit into our office as we grow and expand. There are no available figures of which I am aware, however, on working from home or self-employment for disabled people. We would certainly like to see those figures.