Mr. John Sherwin:

I will make a quick comment about engagement with other committees and hand over to Mr. Walsh who has been engaged with ILMI in pre-budget submissions. The Deputy is correct to identify resources as a problem. DPOs are not funded for this activity of engagement with the State. As this awareness of the value of our contribution grows, so does the demand for our participation, and we are stretched very thin. What we have found to date, although we would always try to respond in whatever way we could, is that we are not invited to other Oireachtas committees to speak about disabled services and matters, and that is wrong. With regard to the structures, of course, we do not expect to be invited to every meeting, and it is not appropriate for us to be at every meeting. There are meetings that should be with the State and service providers only, but there are also the correct structures and times that we should be involved in those meetings, and we find that we are not being invited to those meetings. In the previous Committee on Disability Matters, we raised this point and sought this committee's support in engaging with other committees.

As a general comment, and I am sure members are all reading into this role with the new committee, it is always a challenge for us as political representatives because committees change, and we feel like we are starting a little bit from scratch, and I am sure members do as well in a lot of instances. I just want to highlight that perhaps there is an opportunity for the committee to have access to and review our submissions to the previous committee.

To address Senator Murphy O'Mahony's question earlier about what has changed in the last ten years, a lot of disability campaigners will say that, unfortunately, the rate of change is very slow. A lot of the time, the papers that have been developed and that we put our resources into last year and the year before are still highly relevant and they are exactly the same things we would say today. Maybe this is an opportunity as well for the committee to review some of those papers - there are not too many - and we could engage in a session where we would answer questions on the submissions that have already been made rather than perhaps putting our limited resources into making new submissions that are effectively saying the same thing.