Ms Emilie Conway:

I will follow up on what Ms Ó Brolcháin Carmody said about language. A change in language could represent a shift to a social model. That could also prompt more cross-Departmental collaboration, which is required. I will give a further example. We have tried to contact the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media and get bounced back to the Departments of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth or Social Protection. We have not been able to communicate directly and many things are changing within the arts at the moment, especially in response to the pandemic. We have not been able to represent the experience of artists with disabilities at any of those levels.

I will speak briefly about self-employment and how the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has, to the best of our assessment, not been involved when the Department of Social Protection, through all the disability payments, supports self-employment. Our experience is that it looks like there is lack of connection in making legislation and regulations. First of all, the blind pension is taxable, which means, unlike other disability payments that are allowances, people on the blind pension are bounced into having to register as self-employed at very low levels of additional income, approximately €6,000. Means test reductions apply immediately that do not take into account a self-employed disabled person is competing in an open market with disabled peers, with the additional cost and impact of disability, to make a living. The State offers many supports to non-disabled employers to hire disabled people. However, it does not offer any supports to disabled self-employed people. Again, there is no input from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

The timeframe of audits does not coincide with Revenue's annual assessment and the criteria of assessments differ between the disability allowance audits and the Revenue audits. This brings about inaccurate and misleading assessments resulting in an unfair adjustment of support. This points to a disconnect between the two Departments. It also results in, at least, a double administrative load for the person with a disability in self-employment. The uncertainty attached to the timing and fall-outs of these two distinct audits are detrimental to physical, emotional and mental health. Furthermore, the double administrative load the disabled self-employed endure versus our non-disabled peers is a discriminatory practice.

For the blind pension and disability allowance, the mandatory change of income reporting within three months remains. This is wholly inconsistent with being self-employed as an artist where income varies hugely over a 12-month period. On the subject of audits, we had a self-employed disabled artist audited last year in the middle of the pandemic. We put in parliamentary questions to the Department of Social Protection raising the necessity of auditing a disabled person in the middle of a pandemic.

The artist also had a health situation so was cocooning. The response by the Department was that in its process it had taken into account and was compliant with all of the restrictions. The audit is an absolute expression of ableism because the Department took no account of the risks and insisted that the artist, who was cocooning, bring in somebody from the outside thus risking contracting Covid to complete the audit. Needless to say, the audit was wholly out of step with the person's returns to Revenue and was inaccurate.