Ms Claire Hayes:

I thank the Senator for her questions. I very much appreciate that. In terms of the grants, particularly around assistive technology and awareness training, the assistive tech grants are only for private companies, as the Senator said, so this immediately excludes charities and public bodies. It creates an issue in that sense because the individual who seeks out the grant may not be able to get it. This assistive technology makes a huge difference to a person's experience in work, his or her ability to do the job, the person's impact on his or her team and his or her workload. The fact the grants are only focused on private companies has come up as a bit of an issue with some of the participants I have worked with when we have to look for extra supports and figure out what route to go down and how it works.

The other thing with the assistive tech is that it stays with the company. If a company has an employee and applies for the grant to get the assistive technology, and that employee, after a year or two or however long, moves on to another role, he or she has to go through the whole process again when starting at the new company, rather than bringing that piece of tech with him or her.

I think it was Ms Finn who earlier touched on the reasonable accommodations passport, which goes with the individual.

Discussing a person's reasonable accommodations and what they need within their role is part of creating that inclusive approach to how we do work and education. It should be brought with them rather than being left as they move on.

In terms of the access offices, our course with TU Dublin finished up at the end of last year and was a great success. I mentioned previously that self-employment and entrepreneurship is an area that is rarely explored for people with disabilities. When we talk about employment, we always assume that the person with the disability is the employee rather than the employer. Opening up our conversation and changing how we approach that is so important. I will have to come back to the committee on the LEOs. We are in the middle of doing research on how the course went and our findings in that regard. I will come back to the committee with firm facts on what we can do better when we are supporting a person with a disability on his or her entrepreneurship journey. Mr. Kelly might want to speak on this because he is about to embark on that right now.

A disability employment allowance could have an enormous impact. At the moment, so many of the people that I speak to cannot take the risk of losing support. If they take the risk and are left without it, how do they support themselves? Creating a system that provides real support rather than being just a welfare support would be great. Support that has momentum and movement and that allows people to continue to progress rather than staying stagnant would have a huge impact on a person's well-being, mental health and day-to-day life. When people are looking for work and struggling to find it, and when they keep getting knock-backs, that can have a huge impact on their confidence. One of the things I have seen with the participants on our projects is that from education through to employment, they have had a significant number of knock-backs. They have faced a lack of understanding from their educator or their employer and have felt excluded, set apart or othered in certain situations. We need to encourage people with disabilities to begin to apply for positions but we also need to educate employers, teachers and lecturers so that people with disabilities feel safe in those environments and are not being knocked back but are being included. Social inclusion is so important, as is the feeling of belonging. In that context, a disability employment allowance would have a massive impact. I say that based on the experiences I have seen and the feedback I have received from participants.

I will send an email with more information on the LEOs.