Mr. R?n?n Hession:

I will try to cover as much ground as I can. Between my colleague and I, if there is anything we miss, we will come back to the Deputy.

On the breakdown - this has come up in some of the other contributions - we need medical information to make decisions on certain payments. That does not necessarily give us an entitlement for that information to migrate to employment services. I will give the Deputy some level of insight into how many autistic people we are potentially paying income supports to. Since about 2017, our applications include detail on what are called International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision, ICD-10, codes, in other words, a description of what the condition is. We have those codes for approximately a third of our customer base on disability allowance. We have it for 50,000 or 55,000 people. Within those, approximately 5,000 are in the category of developmental conditions, including autism. We know for approximately a third, and of the ones we know, about 10% of them are potentially autism. That does not answer the Deputy’s question about how many in total, but it gives her an indicator of the level of connection.

I have two comments on the income disregards. Yes, we talk to other Departments and try to align. It is difficult. The nature of budgets is that the budget process does not facilitate necessarily open dialogue and consultation around what is going to happen, including with other Departments. Sometime, things do not align the way we would like them to. The Department of Health, in this case, the Department of Education and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, which deals with the Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grant, for example, are all represented on that steering group. That is chaired by the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte. They are involved, know the direction of travel and are inputting to the responses. The Deputy asked about the assessment of need and whether the people leading on the assessment of need are involved in the national disability inclusion strategy steering group. Yes, they are all there. It is whole-of-government – and not just Government talking to itself. There are also the disability stakeholder groups and their various agencies, such as the NDA and so on.

On an identifier, this goes back to the point around who we have data on. Would it be beneficial? I will explain the partial capacity benefit for anyone in the room or watching who is not familiar with the scheme. For example, someone who is on either invalidity pension or illness benefit for a longer duration can keep a proportion of their payment when they leave and go back to work. The proportion they keep is linked to the restriction arising from their condition. We do not necessarily have an identifier. In the case of partial capacity benefit, they are people who are going back to work in their normal sector, wherever they work, so the identifier there is not something we share with an employer. The back to work enterprise allowance is for people starting their business. A customer may come to us and say they have particular needs. If you have met one person with autism, then you have met one autistic person. It is not necessarily easy to do a standard approach. The main thing is that we are sensitive to it, we can accommodate it and make sure they know what supports are available.

The AsIAm report on autism in the workplace is interesting. We certainly took things from it. I mentioned in my opening statement that we are reviewing the reasonable accommodation fund. AsIAm made a submission as part of the consultation process. We had a good response on the consultation on that one. They made points that we can take on board that are practical and insightful. One of the interesting things in that report was the sort of culture around autism, in a sense, or the perceptions that either the persons themselves or their employer might have. The report, for example, shows that autistic people are reluctant to ask for reasonable accommodation because they think it might be off-putting for the employer. There is a reticence also in that report on behalf of employers because they say simply do not know enough about it and they are afraid of getting it wrong. That report, if I recall correctly, was done in collaboration with IrishJobs.ie, the recruitment website. It is good that employers are in the conversation on that stuff and they are trying to improve. I am estimating that everyone is trying to improve it, as opposed to retreat to their comfort zone.

That leaves a big gap in the middle we all, including the Government, have to step into.

The issue of domiciliary care allowance and anxiety around GPs was mentioned. One of the things about DCA is a child can go on it very young and stay on it until he or she is 16. Children change so much, especially those with a diagnosis, and while their diagnosis of being on the spectrum will still be appropriate, their needs will change as they get older. I completely understand the anxiety that is there. We rely on GP assessments. In our systems, we have medical assessors who are primarily looking at the extent to which what the GPs are telling us helps us understand children's eligibility under the criteria. It is the GPs we rely on. We try to work with the various stakeholder groups and caring organisations to make sure people understand how we intend to use the information. We are trying to be as objective as we can. It is not intended as a trap for anybody.

I hope I have covered most of the ground. Ms Hurley or the Deputy might tell me if there is anything I have missed.