Ms Emilie Conway:

Ms Ó Brolcháin Carmody took the words out of my mouth. We have an horrific human rights record at the moment with how we treat our vulnerable and how we treat women. It is time for us to take a lead. As Ms Ó Brolcháin Carmody said, I have also not come across any country that has got it right. I am part of creative Europe's EU PUSH panel of artists. We will be going to Norway in January regarding a creative lab and a creative process with different bodies. I will then be working with many European artists. I have raised this exact point with them to discover how Europe treats artists and how other European countries support them. So far it does not seem as if anybody has got it right and therefore Ireland could lead. As I do that work, I am happy to feed back to the committee what I discover.

On setting up a company, a point that Deputy Tully raised, some artists do that and our experience has also been that they are put in the position that their enterprise must succeed in two years. This is just ableism. Whenever we do anything, it is like we are put into the framework of ableist expectations and that our disabilities go away as soon as we do anything, but they do not. People do not overcome - I do not like that wording - a disability. We achieve with our disability. Just because we have a disability, that does not mean we cannot achieve. What all this points to is a system that never expected those of us at this meeting and people like us to achieve anything. We were bunged into institutions and, as we know, people are still hidden away in institutions in Ireland, which is criminal.

We are bumping up against the system, just as Catherine Gallagher did, because we were never expected to achieve. I recall a visit to my eye doctor when I was in secondary school. He never spoke directly to me but always to my parents over my head. He winked at them one time and said, "You know, she might actually manage college". I was like, "What?". The system's expectations of us are so low and demeaning. This all needs to change. As we are seeing, people with disabilities do achieve. It should not be based on that either. There should be equal support and no need for someone to be a massive achiever to be supported. Everybody should be equally able to do whatever they can do in their lives and be supported to do so. I thank the committee.