Mr. John Sherwin:

I will make a comment on ISL in schools. All of us hearing people grew up through primary and post-primary education in which we received an English language class every day. Deaf children do not receive ISL classes. They do not receive tuition in other subjects through their own language. There is an educational barrier that further impacts employment and the notion of self-employment at a later age.

We accept there are many problems that need to be addressed, and we are all very much on a journey to try to address them, but I would like to focus on a core problem that we can solve today, which is speaking to us about services for us. Meaningful engagement, although it will not solve everything immediately, would allow us to see we are working together to solve things together. There needs to be transparency and engagement on funding allocations and how disability budgets are spent. We need to be involved in these decisions and not just told what they are. This is something we would like to focus on.

There are fewer DPOs in Ireland than there should be and we hope there will be more and more as disabled people are empowered to form their own organisations. If we are to engage we need funding to do so. Often we sit at meeting tables where the disabled person is the only unpaid person there, perhaps in a voluntary capacity. The Irish Deaf Society is a company which has paid employees but many of our members and other disabled people appear in a voluntary capacity. They are expected to give critical analysis and feedback to a professional cohort of policy developers on the same level. We would like to see some funding for DPOs to provide this type of feedback. There is no funding for this today. None of our DPOs are funded to provide meaningful engagement. We need capacity and capability, improvements and delivery programmes. Help us to help you, and we can all help each other to progress on achieving meaningful and effective service delivery. Gradually, over time, we will solve these problems together.