Mr. Peter Kearns:

To expand on that point and in terms of what Mr. Walshe has said, I am based up Leitrim. I am involved in activities there and in County Sligo and the Border counties. In terms of a systemic process, in 2018 Sligo County Council adopted the social model for disabilities but it took a lot of work to get there. Adopting it is the easy part; the hard part is implementing the social model in a systematic way through the council. That's now starting to reap rewards. There are platforms like the Sligo Public Participation Network that now recognise that Sligo DPO is now the voice of disabled people, so they are going to us directly and not necessarily going to the service providers. That is our experience across most of the country. Service providers do not have the mandate or structures to speak for disabled people. The Sligo DPO has a mandate to speak with and for disabled people. It is a long process to get the local systematic platforms to recognise that the DPOs are the voice of disabled people.

We have had to do a lot of disability equality workshops for councillors and all of that over the year to get them to recognise that disability is not about a cure or about fixing an impairment, it is about looking at the daily barriers and fixing those. Quite a lot of resources have to go into capacity building a system to talk to your DPO.