Mr. Peter Kearns:

On DPOs and communications and dialogue, we use a lot of creative methods, like drama and video. With that in mind, we are setting up a disabled persons' disability arts organisation. We have found disabled artists are coming to us and they all want to do art and creative work on climate change and disabled people. I also work with my colleagues up in Belfast in an arts and disability forum. They had a disability arts DPO for years. They did it years ahead of us. In the South, we do not have a disabled artists' DPO. Even though we have disabled people coming to us wanting to explore climate change, the system is not there at the moment. It falls to us in ILMI. Many people would say we are boxing above our weight in terms of resources, but disabled people are coming to us to set up local DPOs because we are seen as the organisation which has that skill. Local DPOs or specific issue-based DPOs take a lot of resources and confidence. One woman yesterday came from Carlow. She is involved in the VOICE project down there, but she has rely on a local special bus to get from Carlow to Dublin. She could not rely on the public transport. We want to give her the confidence to use public transport, but she herself has to go back to the service providers to get that. It is a long process to build up the collective voice of disabled people and the resources are not there at the moment to do that.