Ms Kerry Lawless:

I return to the point Deputy Tully raised about the financial side of it. It is significant and it is significant for anyone with a disability at any level trying to get back into education. The Deputy mentioned the report released last year that showed the disability tax - that every single part of our lives costs us extra. The more profound the disability is, the more it costs. I am quite fortunate in that I live in Dublin and want to attend a university there. However, even though I live in Finglas and DCU is the university I attend, getting the bus there from Finglas south is quite a big deal. It takes quite a while, walking is involved and if you want to do it more quickly, you have to change bus so it is much easier for me to drive. The cost to all of us of trying to keep a car on the road is high. Try doing that with a disability payment and when you have been in receipt of one for over a decade. You do not have the resources or savings, are struggling day to day and then have these extra expenses. There is no provision anywhere in the system such as through the community welfare officer.

This is true for people with disabilities going back into work as well. If we are honest and if we want people with a disability or multiple disabilities to get back into training at whatever level and to be able to re-enter the labour market, we must recognise those additional costs. I spent two months last month trying to attend university remotely on my phone because I dropped my 12-year-old laptop and this time there was no resurrecting it. It was gone. It took me two months. In the end, I did manage to find a little pocket of funding and get a laptop but it took weeks to do that. That was it because I do not have the resources. I am very advantaged in many ways but I do not have the financial resources or that family support for things like laptops, the type of phones you need, the apps and other stuff you need. They are not covered. Again, if we are looking at people with disabilities who also have economic disadvantage and come from low-income areas or personal situations, we must be realistic. Unless there is a top-up grant and we provide certain things as a given, it is all just nice words.

It is a little bit like the assistive technology I spoke about. We are saying all these things are over here but you need to take these four steps to get there and we are not going to help you with those four steps. There is a presumption within all the social welfare models I have ever used for disability that you have a family that supports you and that you are not a full-grown adult who has been living on your own and supporting yourself for quite a while. The presumption is that people have families that will come in and make up for the gaps that are there. We are going to find more and more people like me who have acquired disabilities - people who survive terrible falls and brain injuries such as those we heard about today or the type of illness I got. Hopefully, more of us are going to survive and live for longer.

We want full and meaningful lives. Education is part of that but we need the Government to give us the social capital and resources we need to access it. It is a little bit like that cartoon that we all know, where all the different animals are asked to climb a tree. One is an elephant, another is a monkey and they are all saying that it is an equal opportunity and everyone just has to climb that tree there. We need a little bit of honesty and we are either willing to recognise the disability tax and the fact that it costs us more to live and increase the social welfare supports accordingly, or we are not. To be quite honest, we then need to stop with all of the aspirational talk. We are either serious about allowing and helping people with disabilities to access education and giving them the extra resources that they need, or, again, we are not.