Mr. Damien Walshe:

To move from rhetoric to actions is music to my ears and to any disabled person listening in. It would be really helpful for this committee to bring that in. We must move away from the soft sell of awareness of the issues disabled people face, to enforcement. We need to talk about rights, not charity and things like access to public transport, as Mr. Kearns said, not as an additional add-on or something that might be done, but as something embedded in the very core of how the Exchequer spends its funding. If the committee was to do one thing based on today's discussion around building sustainable, safe and inclusive towns and cities, it should be to bring in the people responsible for planning and ask them how they will ensure make their work compliant with the UNCRPD because it clearly is not. As Mr. Kearns said, there are many concerns, whether in small or large towns or cities, that disabled people are seeing a regression in the rights they have fought hard for over 20 or 30 years, which is being done under the rhetoric of sustainability. They are not incompatible. In fact, one of the sustainable development goals, as I am sure Ms Gilmartin will point out, is around sustainable, inclusive and safe towns and human communities. That would be a very useful action because we do not see at a local level that there is a genuine understanding.

Going back to Deputy Ellis's point around whether that engagement is there, Mr. Kearns said yes. We are starting to see the fruits of our labour and that of other DPOs, including members of the DPO Network. That takes time but we cannot wait for people to do the right thing, as the infrastructure of DPOs becomes resourced and developed. There must be some form of regulation and oversight of how our cities and towns are developed. Going back to the point around public transport, there have been instances of disabled people being segregated from society. There has been a reliance on special buses. It is not part of a modern, 21st-century society that disabled people are reliant on a charity to bring them from A to B, to that charity. Where are the choice, control and agency for someone to decide they are going to get the bus into town, because that is what everyone else does, and for them to know when they get into town they do not need to worry about getting knocked over by an e-scooter or a cyclist and when they go to a space, they can navigate it safely like everyone else should expect to do. One action would be to move from awareness that this is an issue to consideration of what our obligations are under Article 9 of the UNCRPD, under the sustainable development goals and our public sector duty, under section 42 of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act.