Dr. Shari McDaid:

To respond to Deputy Durkan's point about decongregation in the context of mental health, successive mental health policies have advocated for community care, but nobody has named it as what it really is, which is family care. One reason we need to review A Vision for Change is that we need to recognise the substantial role that families play in supporting people to live independently in the community and to describe that role and the supports that families need to fulfil that role. That also means that we need to understand more about the role that local community groups play in supporting people's recovery and value, to quantify that role and make sure that it is specified as clearly as we have specified the numbers of psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, occupational therapists and psychologists that we need. That is one aspect of it.

The only other thing I want to say about the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, is that the biggest difficulty that this country has had is in implementing things. If the UNCRPD is ratified, the real challenge will be to implement its aspirations and to implement what it means. That means having clear plans for implementation. We have had a roadmap to ratification, but we actually need a roadmap for implementation. We have a starting point. We were supposed to have an updated implementation plan for the national disability strategy, which is sadly not visible, though many of us have been involved in inputting into what we hope it will look like. There is an urgent need to publish the implementation plan for the UNCRPD, to resource that implementation plan and have dedicated capacity to drive the implementation of the UNCRPD.