Ms Hannah Gilmartin:

As stated earlier, when we were setting up our stakeholder forum committee, which is responsible for collaboratively designing our national stakeholder forum meetings, last year, we made sure to have one representative from a DPO on the committee. The committee comprises 12 people from different sectors and backgrounds. We sent an invite to a wide range of DPOs. We are very fortunate to have a representative from Disabled Women Ireland on the committee.

A key focus for us is to make our national stakeholder forum meetings as open and accessible to everyone. We have done this in a number of ways. We make sure that the promotional material is written in plain English. It is simply just saying that everyone is welcome and that we will facilitate different requirements. We have made sure that the venues are wheelchair accessible. We have sign language interpreters. We have a quite room for people who might need to take a sensory break or their own sort of break. The feedback from our forum meeting in January indicated that it would be good to have live transcription for people who process information better by reading. We have that option in place for the forum meeting in April. We are not trying to say we are experts now but we have started the conversation and it is an opportunity to hear what people need to engage with us at the stakeholder forum meetings. In addition, we have included people with lived experience. A representative of AsIAm spoke at our meeting in January. We are on the right track, and we want to keep learning from each stakeholder meeting going forward.

In July, we will present Ireland's 2023 voluntary national review, which is a progress report on Ireland's implementation of the SDGs, to the United Nations. We have invited the National Disability Authority to submit a chapter for inclusion in the official report. So the authority will consider how are the SDGs being implemented in terms of disabled people and are they being implemented with disabled people. We very much look forward to that contribution.