Mr. Peter Brabazon:

I thank the Senator for those questions. Late diagnosis is a problem. We try to build up people's confidence to advocate for themselves. We only work with young adults, people over the age of 18. However, there are groups working in the area of education. For example, AsIAm focuses on advocacy and all of that. We work very closely with that organisation in respect of handovers. I mentioned the challenge of late diagnosis in the paper. We did a very interesting project with Dublin City University, DCU, which has grown to involve a number of other colleges. In a confidential survey, of those people who had a disability, including autism, who we asked, 50% did not disclose that disability to disability services in their college. You can imagine what is going on there. There is a challenge there. It is improving. That survey was a few years ago. How do we get this awareness? The first thing is that this is a societal issue. There is that level of information. AsIAm certainly works on that level. On the level of employer information, we do a lot of presentations to employers about the issues. Risk is the big thing for them, whether that be financial, reputational or of some other kind. They do not complete the work. We chat to them about that. What you can gain is the benefit of a person's talent, but you also gain a loyal person most of the time, which answers the earlier question. It is a process of change. Many of the parents, like myself, led on a lot of this. However, it is now falling more and more to professionals. I will take the college we worked with in Tralee for example. We have worked with a lot of colleges and, because of the general data protection regulation and so on, they suggest people come to us when they feel we can work with them. That has been an excellent model.

We have now been asked by the Tralee campus of the new Munster Technological University to support its people who are advising their students on who could become our candidates. It is a slowly growing area. Ms Murphy may want to speak on this.