Mr. Desmond Kenny:

Recruitment and identification is important and they have become a huge difficulty. We currently have a working group within ILMI to tease out people's own experience and learn ideas about the best way to proceed. In some ways we can over-sophisticate the expectation. Do I need somebody with a Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI, level of training or whatever, to come to the cinema with me, or take me for a walk in the park? The answer is "No". There could be elderly people or family people who want a couple of hours and who can meet certain requirements so far as a minimum standard of training. They could do a lot of work and be more available in communities to do work. We must look at the combination of support. I call them packages but they are more like units of design to assemble what people want in their programme of support. They must decide in some way how to do that. It is frightfully important they do that. It is also important that we recognise, right upfront, how committed to and individually supportive of our systems are Ms O'Neill, Mr. O'Regan and the staff in the HSE. Sometimes they are overwhelmed, and committees like this in some ways overwhelm them even more. Life is now full of squeaking wheels and the pressures of the next discovered inadequacy, the next right not complied with or the next belief that something should happen. The expansion for the cry for redress of neglect over recent decades from committees and active groups like this and the enthusiasm for the UNCRPD is creating a cacophony of extra noise and expectations within the system. Behind all of that, what Mr. Walshe has referred to as the industry of disability, a characterisation I agree with, is adjusting its own language of protection. I have seen it over decades. It started as an immediate fallback from the absence of the removal of religious commitment and personnel from saints being laicised and taken over. They have adjusted to the continuity of their own survival. There are more than 40,000 people working on the periphery of our needs. They do not let us in totally. To some extent, they are part of the largest squeaking wheel system in the whole delay in individualising rights for disabled people. I do not know what can be done about it, as it cannot in any way be dismantled. They are good people and good agencies. However, they are removed from our ethos and the ethos of independence and seeing people as individuals. We are a collective of the disabled - a massive group. That again is part of the problem.

The committee members and others here and in the HSE are quite rightly presented with the number of people and with the aggregate of need within a collective of a disability type. Why do we not dismantle the need into a collective of needs to be met, rather than all of the time looking at disability specifically by blindness, deafness, what was once the inability to walk and whatnot. If people require social work, then they do, whether they are blind, deaf, or had polio in the past. What we are doing is contributing to the continuity of the machine of disability that exists and supports, but it does minimise the right to access.

In my last years, I have come back to the belief it is again time for direct action. The continuity of survival within the system of people continuously presenting and representing in regard to the next report and the next feasibility study goes on. In a way, we have all contributed to that. What we need to do is to decouple ourselves from the collective of noise in order to create our own individuality of lives. That is not in any way to denigrate our bigger gains. I think this committee will do great things within the UNCRPD and in its the unravelling of the multiple streams of complexity, and God help us listening to the multiple squeaking wheels that will come before the committee.