Nem Kearns:

I will just briefly add to the points made by Ms Hassett. We seem to be unable to connect the dots. We are talking about disabled women's inequality vis-à-vis educational attainment and access but we do not join the dots in the sense that this means that when we are trying to advocate and form DPOs, we have fewer people who have knowledge of corporate governance and GDPR. We also need access to training in those areas to be fully empowered and fully self-representative and regulating.

Regarding gender-based violence, we have highlighted the fact that the majority of such violence experienced by disabled women, girls and non-binary people is from their caretakers and family members. Currently, there is not sufficient provision in law to capture those relationships. We do not have equal protection under the law. To put the issue of financial dependency in real terms, we are speaking to women who tell us that they cannot wait until they turn 66 so that they can get the State pension and leave a spouse who has been abusing them every day for 40 years. Financial dependency is not an abstract concept. We are talking about people who are entirely dependent on their abuser to eat, get out of bed, access medication and so on. This is urgent. Every day that we continue to link disabled people's rights and their ability to literally survive to the people around them, we are leaving them facing abuse every single day. We cannot keep dragging our heels on this or keep thinking it is quite an abstract, budgetary condition. We need to empower disabled people to be individuals, to stand on their own two feet or roll on their own two wheels. I am very passionate about this. We need to connect those dots and start seeing the reality, not just the academic reading off a page that disabled women experience this and that. No disabled woman who is trapped in a home with abuse is going to be able to advocate at all. We need to give them the tools to escape the situation they are in before we can expect them to advocate, consult or anything else. The onus is on us, not on the most marginalised and vulnerable.

On the burden of access and advocacy on the individual, this is also an issue about which we are quite cautious. Of course, we are advocates and we are fully in favour of empowering everyone to advocacy but we are also absolutely clear that advocacy is hard. It takes a lot of learning and is a skill that needs support, energy and time to exercise. It cannot be demanded of every single disabled person, just because an individual is a disabled person. We are also speaking to people and trying to support our members who encountering obstacle after obstacle. Disabled students at third level, for example, are having to ask every single lecturer and faculty member before every single module of every single course every single year to explain their reasonable accommodations and then request that those be upheld. Let us be honest, at this stage it is still a request.

We do not have robust enough statutory support in this regard. The nominal cost of reasonable accommodation is unclear and is difficult for a disabled individual to demand. What is a nominal fee? How does a disabled person argue with someone refusing accommodation on the grounds that it does not apply? "Nominal" can mean anything apart from "free".

The response we often get from universities is that they are teaching people how to self-advocate. They genuinely mean that, but what they are saying means that they are not going to remove any of the obstacles in the system or move to universal design and they are going to force every single disabled person who attends them to spend his or her time and energy on a large administrative, emotional and psychological burden that non-disabled students do not have to go through to get equal access. The elephant in the room is that ableism exists and is structural and systemic. It is not just one person saying a mean thing to another person, yet this is what we are asking disabled advocates to go up against every time they speak and have to request access. When we are asking people to advocate their way over barriers, we are not removing those barriers, so the next person is going to have to advocate for the same thing as well. As such, this will happen time and again, no progress or systemic change will be made and disabled people will be exhausted.

No disabled person gets to college age without learning how to advocate, but we also have to pick our battles and live with the consequences of our advocacy. When we speak out, not everyone takes that well and there can be retaliation and other negative consequences. There are also risks, which we highlighted in our written submission. In particular, disabled parents who speak out are terrified that they will lose their children. They are not being irrational. Parental capacity is adjudged in a highly ableist way in a highly ableist system. This ties into gender-based violence. We are speaking to disabled women who are staying with abusers because their abusers are using the ableism in the system as a weapon, saying that if the women leave or report them, they will take custody of the children because the women have X diagnosis. We are also speaking to disabled women who have left an abuser and have immediately had their children taken away from them due to a diagnosis. A study in Australia found that more than half of disabled women who reported gender-based violence had their children removed from their custody temporarily or permanently. We need to be able to name these things and to talk about the elephant in the room, that being, ableist bias.

Deputy Cairns referred to the burden of access on the individual. I congratulate her on her recent promotion, although I do not know if that is the right word.