Ms Rosaleen Lally:

I will come in with an example of where universal design can work well. The IWA is an approved housing body and we are currently working with Mayo County Council on a development that is due to start next year. The council approached us to see if we would be interested in buying a part of the site, initially, last year. It would be one corner of the site for us to build wheelchair-livable housing on. We always prefer pepperpotted developments so we did not take it. The council came back to us and asked if we would like to take another version.

To make a long story short, we all agreed that rather than us taking the site and having architects and designers in there, Mayo County Council would build on the site and work with us on the planning for the eight houses to best practice access guidelines and standards. The very novel design for us is that there is an interlinking personal assistant, PA, room which interlinks two houses. The HSE loves this because one PA can work with two tenants for overnights and things like that. It has been a very good project. The HSE was involved from the outset. We were conscious, like somebody else said, that this is a catch-22 situation. If somebody gets a house, they cannot apply for a PA until they have the house. We have a young man in Dublin at the minute in that very situation - we have a house for him but he cannot get a PA service and it may be six to eight months before he can get one. He is now fearful that he will lose the house.

The Mayo project is example of a very good cross-communication between all of the Departments. When we went to the HSE, it said that it had 28 people who needed housing, some of whom were in nursing homes. When we went back to it and asked if they were all approved on the social housing waiting list, only two of them had actually been approved. A very significant amount of work was involved in going back to get everybody onto the social housing waiting list. This is another issue. Our Think Ahead, Think Housing campaign encourages and supports people with disabilities to get onto the social housing waiting list. People do not think ahead with regard to the length of time it can sometimes take to get a house, which could be ten years. We are trying to support people. Without a doubt, we know that people with disabilities are greatly underrepresented on the social housing waiting list because it is such a bureaucratic and hard system to go through. This development in Mayo, where we almost have received approval from the Department to go well beyond the 10% floor space, is very much a trial project. If it works, hopefully it can be replicated across the country where these types of houses can be provided and the plan can be used in other local authorities. I return again to the point that until Part M is reviewed and the regulations are in place so that there is no confusion, that will be the only way it is going to work in the private sector.