Mr. John Sherwin:

The message about meaningful participation is coming across clearly in this meeting and the need for it and to build on what is already there. I wanted to voice our concern. We have no doubt that State organisations and local authorities are growing in awareness of the CRPD and the need to involve DPOs, but when we are asked for input and we do not have the resources or capacity to deliver in the timely fashion that may be required by organisations, we need an attitude from the State that this would be a call to action to resource us, not that it becomes a tick-box to say that it has been attempted and failed because the DPOs did not have the resources. This is something we are concerned about.

We realise it is going to take several years with the best will in the world to build capacity and resources for DPOs and we are glad to be at the early stages of that journey. We need the State to recognise that as well. When we talk about agencies working together, what we find is that quite often we are asked to participate in discussion forums that overlap in terms of content. We may be sitting on three different committees talking about the same thing, so while we need agencies working together we also need joined-up thinking about how to maximise the resources DPOs have as they grow.