Ms Julie Tonge:

I thank the Deputy for her questions. There are some services available but they are very patchy and only a minority of students have engaged with those services, in our experience. For example, Gheel Autism Services might contact UCD and ask questions about a particular student whom it supported before he or she went to college. That is great but it is just one student. UCD has over 200 students with autism at the moment. That figure refers only to the students who have sought support from the disability service, so the real figure is likely to be higher. While there are some services, they are patchy and I am not sure how students access them. It would be nice to see those services expanded and more formalised links established with employers and further and higher education in order that it would become more usual for these services to be in touch with UCD and for us to support them in supporting the students or future students.

Likewise, there are some specialised career consultants and a number of organisations. For example, Specialisterne is a company that works with autistic people around employment. These companies tend to be quite niche, however. Specialisterne, for example, focuses in particular on students who are interested in tech but that does not cover all students with autism. They have a broad range of interests and, in fact, the majority of students with autism in UCD are studying arts and not computer science. There needs to be more organisations that provide employment but they need to be more holistic rather than focused on one career pathway.

The Irish Wheelchair Association has a life skills development programme for people with physical disabilities. Something similar to that for people with autism would be a good place to start. I talked about the emotional impact of adult diagnosis. We see students paying for private diagnoses and they get no information other than the label and they get no follow-up support in any way. They come into a service like ours with a piece of paper that says they found out last week that they are autistic and that is challenging information. Deputy Joan Collins mentioned the person she met who got a diagnosis of ADHD. That can be helpful because it can make a lot of sense for people sometimes and they can better understand things that have happened in their lives to date. Also, people do not know what to do with that diagnosis, what the impact of it is for them or how they can even seek support. It can be a disconcerting time and often students can question whether they are able to continue in university now that they have this diagnosis. They forget that they are the same people they were before the diagnosis was received.