Mr. Adam Harris:

With regard to the issue around adults, we were talking a moment ago about better transition planning. That is something we are seeing as a real failure at the moment. As the Deputy said, people can fall off a cliff when they hit 16 or 18 years of age, so we need to see a much more seamless planning pathway with regard to supports for people progressing from children's services to adult services. Unfortunately, what Deputy Canney described is something we see all too often. People have to present to accident and emergency departments and at times also have to rely on the emergency services. That shows a system in crisis and a system that has not established those pathways. When we talk about autistic adults in Ireland generally, there is a significant lack of supports. To give the Deputy one example, there is still no public pathway for adult assessment of autism in Ireland. We see people incur huge costs of up to €850 to get something that was not identified in a timely way when they were a child. That is a huge challenge.

It is always challenging when we pick another country because there can be a sense that the grass can always be greener. Then, when we go to European meetings and meet colleagues, they tell us that there are huge challenges in their contexts as well. There are certainly some similarities. I would say that culturally we are in a very promising place. We are in a leadership role in some respects in that there has been a shift on the ground at a community level. People are committed to becoming more inclusive even if they do not know the steps we have to take to get there.

We are moving further and further away from the medical model, which is welcome. That is not necessarily the case in every European country. Inevitably, we would have to point to Scandinavia as having examples of good practice in the area of autism. I would also say that despite challenges around resources, we would also see a far superior delivery of supports and services within the UK. Certainly, as an organisation, we have learned a huge amount from engaging with Scottish Autism. I know the Deputy has been working for some time around the idea of putting the autism strategy into legislation in Ireland and, of course, that is something that has been in place in Scotland for many years now. There are definitely learnings we can take from Scotland.