Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh:

Good afternoon. I am glad to be here. I am also glad that Senator Flynn, another Traveller, is in the room. Often, we find ourselves as the only minority.

I wish to discuss the assessment process through a Traveller and Roma lens. We are aware of the lack of assessments and diagnoses. However, when you are poor and a parent in a generation that did not have educational opportunities, it is difficult to negotiate your way through the system to ensure your child gets an assessment and is put through the right doors rather than the wrong doors. We have anecdotal evidence of Traveller and Roma children who were not assessed or diagnosed and whom the school system treated badly by, for example, sending them home at 11 a.m. and using mechanisms that were totally inappropriate in terms of children's rights by restraining them. We must acknowledge not only ableism, which is a particular form of discrimination faced by all disabled people, but also racism where the child and the parent are abused by the system, a system we hope would empower and cherish all our children.

I wish to discuss adult diagnoses and how many older adults are coming to this late and finding it difficult to get diagnoses. If you are lucky enough and middle class enough, you can afford that diagnosis, but if you have reached 50 years of age, you know something is not right in the world around you and no one tells you what that is, it is an isolating and disempowering experience. You are not flourishing.

IHREC is A-rated. Therefore, we would see any positive push towards policy and legislation for autistic people as benefiting the whole disability community, their families and wider Irish society.

What our chief commissioner said about the optional protocol is imperative. I hope that it will be the last job I will have in my lifetime. We need the protocol. The rest of Europe has it. It would sort out much of the domestic situation around assessments and the right to education. I have experienced both segregated education and mainstream education. I was not very good in mainstream education because there were no supports. In segregated education, though, the syllabus was not what it should have been. It was not the same State syllabus. If we are to have supported education in whatever guise, I do not believe that segregated education serves anyone, be it the child, the parent, the wider community or citizens like us, as a society.

Nonetheless, some of us need extra support in the classroom. That support is not only about SNAs or specialised teachers. We also need to be on a par with our non-autistic or non-disabled peers.