Mr. R?n?n Hession:

I do not. What I will say is that when we look at the figures in the census generally, and we are still using 2016 census data because the new census is being released in modules and we do not yet have the disability module, from recollection I think there are about 635,000 people, perhaps, identifying with a disability. I may be wrong on that, in which case forgive me, but the number is of that order. Let us say that that is the number of people who identify as having a disability and that there are 160,000 on disability allowance. One would have to add to that the invalidity pension, which is paid to 150,000 people. Let us say that, all told, roughly a third of the people who identify as having a disability generally are on one of our long-term disability payments. Assuming, as a rough rule of thumb, that the prevalence of autism in that cohort is the same as in the general population, which may be a big assumption, it may be that two thirds of autistic people are not in receipt of our payments.

I am sensitive to the language here because I know from having looked through AsIAm's material, for example, that it would say autism is not itself a disability, even if many autistic people have a disability. I do not mean to use those terms synonymously. If I am oversimplifying this, it is purely to try to get to the bottom of the Deputy's point. Because only a third of people with disabilities are on our long-term schemes, most people with disabilities are not on any payment. In fact, most disabilities are acquired, which is not quite the case with autism. I am sure there are many people who are autistic and who are working, who have very successful careers, who are employers and who are in senior positions throughout every sector in Ireland. I accept, however, that we cannot rule out that there may be people who need help and do not know about it, do not know how to access it or try to access it but find it inaccessible. The latter cohort is certainly of interest to us. We want to make sure that people get the help they need. There is a very low level - an unfeasibly low level - of claiming on things like the reasonable accommodation fund and wage subsidy schemes. Clearly, therefore, they are not working in their current form and we need to change them to make them more user-friendly. We have some ideas on that that I think would help, and we have got a lot of good input from AsIAm and other autism groups.