Mr. Brendan Lennon:

That is okay. The role of those disability officers, or access officers as they are called, is determined under the Disability Act. Their role is to facilitate people with disabilities to access the service of that public provider. It is not necessarily to get involved in making decisions about the priority of the individual case but to ensure that the person gets access. The issue is that many public bodies have no access officers in place. In fact, the HSE has only begun doing that work in the last two years. It had to train up to 500 people in that role. That is a considerable piece of work but the fact that it only started nine or ten years after the Act is not understandable.

I wish to comment on Deputy O'Reilly's query about the delay on the UNCRPD, the European Accessibility Act and the role of that Act. I am not too familiar with the European Accessibility Act but I am more familiar with some of the changes that European law and directives have caused. One of them that is quite significant for the deaf or hard of hearing, and I am familiar with that area, is that in a month or two months, a new text relay service is due to be introduced. It will allow people who cannot make voice calls, that is, people who cannot hear or people who cannot speak, make calls in real time via a relay operator. That is being introduced by order of the Commission for Communications Regulation, ComReg, the regulator of telecommunications providers. It is doing so on foot of an EU directive of some years ago. It is an improvement in accessibility that is being driven by EU law.

The other nice aspect to it is that it is a form of paradigm and cultural shift we need. The cost of the service is nominally the burden of the telecommunications providers. In fact, however, they will pass it on to their customers. The person who uses the service pays the normal rate for making the telephone call or transaction, but all of the customers of telecommunications providers will share the cost of providing that service. The paradigm shift is that this is not a cost that a particular sector or budget bears, but is distributed among all of us. It is an ultimate example of mainstreaming, where everybody does not have equal access. Equal access to a telephone is no good to a deaf person but they have equivalent access to the facility.