Mr. Adam Harris:

I will touch on all of the issues raised. One of the things about this committee is that it is vital that a few clear wins are identified and actioned in the time that we have available. The Minister of State launched the autism innovation strategy, which will last one year and this committee will feed into that. It is important for the committee to think strategically about what will happen beyond that year, so we need to identify what will take three or five years before we see improvements because some of these problems are deep and systemic. There will only be a committee like this once and reaching an agreed understanding of solutions is really important.

The rate of unemployment among autistic people is hugely concerning. In terms of disability as a whole, Ireland is the fourth poorest performer in the EU but it seems particularly different for autism. There is a range of reasons for the high rate of unemployment and AsIAm has looked quite a bit at the issue. Recently in the organisation a new team was established to specifically look at the issue of employment. This year, we will run two pilot programmes in order to get under the roof of the issue a little bit more. One of the big issues is that a lot of the existing support services that support autistic people to gain employment vary greatly from county to county. Even disability-specific employment services do not always have the confidence or a knowledge of autism so sometimes there really is nobody supporting.

Ambition is another issue. We know that the vast majority of autistic people go to mainstream schools like everybody else. We also know that the children who attend special schools do not have access to career guidance so from that stage in education there is a presumption that an autistic person will not be employed within the community. Let us consider the children who are in mainstream education. There are still so many who when the leaving certificate examination comes around, and if they are not going to college, the conversation straightaway shifts to one of whether they will go to a day service as opposed to thinking that they can work.

To be clear, I believe that every autistic person can have a job but that does not mean every autistic person can work even what we might consider to be a part-time contract. It might be that for some people, one day might be so exhausting or overwhelming but I think that it is about the State giving value to that and still going after those jobs. Yes, the person probably will still need their disability allowance but this is about the dignity of participating and all of the problems that can be removed as a result.

There are two things we must look at if we want to change and one is work experience. Literature shows that if we can expose people to work while they are still in education then the chance of them being unemployed after reduces drastically.

Autistic people in college might have to do a mandatory placement. Many of our young people find they cannot get a good internship because they are so overwhelmed in college that their marks do not reflect the quality of their ability. In other instances we might find that a person is so overwhelmed by college work that taking on a job is challenging. We need to find ways to help people to get work experience while they are still in college because it gives them training and back up.

I am delighted the Senator asked about autism-friendly towns. AsIAm created the framework in Clonakilty so I am probably biased in my answer. Clane in County Kildare is one of the towns we are working with. We feel it is a model that does two things. Around the world when we looked at various autism-friendly towns much of the time it was a statement of intent. We felt it had to mean something tangible and it needed to be transparent. We created a framework for a town to follow to reach the standard. It has worked incredibly well. The supports help people in the town on a day to day basis. They are also a driver for tourism. The main thing is that from a very young age autistic people are told the community where they are growing up wants to meet them half way. This can have a real impact from a self-esteem point of view.

We were delighted to be in Malta in 2016 when its legislation was published on world autism day. It is a great example of the importance of consultation. The legislation that became the autism empowerment Act was introduced in the Maltese Parliament as an autism spectrum disorder Bill. Everybody worked very closely with autistic people to develop the oversight council that Malta now has. It is seen as an example of best practice.

The only other comment I will make on best practice is if we want to look at European examples something that is very clear is that we are the only State on these islands that does not have an autism Act. Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales do. This should tell us the direction we should go in this regard.