Mr. Damien Walshe:

On engagement with planners and local structures, and going back to the Local Government Reform Act 2014, there are many potential avenues for disabled people to engage, through their public participation networks, local community development committees, and to influence the local economic community plans. I may sound like a broken record, but DPOs are relatively new. The work we do is led by Mr. Kearns in the Border counties and by our colleagues, Paula Soraghan and Nicola Meacle, in the seven counties in the South. It is only in establishing a connection through those statutory spaces that we can influence how to build sustainable inclusive communities. We have worked with Pobal. Last January, Pobal published a guide that informs local economic community plans and outlines how to include voices that are often marginalised. We wrote a section about the importance of engaging with disabled persons' organisations.

By and large, we have not had the engagement we would like with the planning sections. We would like to establish that relationship through the Local Government Management Agency.

In the absence of people seeing the value of people engaging with DPOs, it is regulation that counts. When we were in here last week we talked about personal assistant services being reliant on good people in the system going the extra mile to try and undo the lack of systemic approaches to engaging disabled people. We need to have a system that regardless of who is responsible for designing urban and rural spaces, whoever is responsible at a local authority level, that it is not whether they want to engage with disabled people. There are very clear standards of what constitutes inclusive, sustainable safe spaces. That gives them the guidance then to engage with disabled people confidently and from the initial stage so not coming to you with a fait accompli and saying, "This is what we are going to go to Part VIII about" because we do not want a situation that it is seen as confrontational. We do not want a situation where we are solely pointing out flaws. However, we do point out flaws when needs be because there are requirements for disabled people to participate in society as equals but, as Mr. Kearns has said, we would like to move to that dialogue because that is what will allow for very real strategic investment of Exchequer funds that meets everyone's needs.