Mr. John Dolan:

I thank Senator Boyhan for his lovely welcome. I do prefer asking the questions than being at the other end answering them.

An excellent point was made by the Senator about unemployment and disability. According to the most recent census, 22% of people with disabilities were in employment whereas the corresponding figure is over 53% for the rest of the population. The home, on that basis, is the place one lives much of one's life. If one has gone past the age of working, that is even a bigger issue. Therefore, it has to be comfortable and spacious. I acknowledge the importance of a garden and or an accessible open space and other places one can be where other people are as well.

Young people in nursing homes and congregated settings is where the housing issue runs into the problems we see in other areas. We made the point earlier that the HSE will say that until one has the accessible living unit there is no point in it doing the personal assistant, PA, piece, and the local authorities are saying it is the other way around. It is that catch-22 that I referred to earlier. One should remember that the person with a disability will be somewhere. He or she will be in an accessible, comfortable home in the right location or squeezed into a house - I am not calling it a home - that he or she cannot fully operate in - that might be the kitchen, the upstairs or the different elements of it, where the person is always pulling things aside to get from A to B, and is not comfortable; in a nursing home; or, in the case of many of the people with intellectual disability, in congregated settings.

People are still in congregated settings. Young people went from the community into nursing homes. They did not spend their young years in a nursing home. That happened because of the lack of a suite of measures - an accessible comfortable home in the right location and a suite of practical instruments, including personal assistants and access to various therapies.

There are commitments, from strong to not so strong, in the programme for Government around some of these things. The capacity review, in terms of pumping extra funding into the disability services, itself can be a slow burn but an important game-changer around this issue, but one cannot get away from the square metre or square foot, whatever language, old-fashioned language or new, one wants to use. One does not live in a virtual house. One lives in a house and one has to be able to put one's elbows out. That is it. There is no other way around it.