Dr. Mary Keogh:

I thank the Senator very much for her comments. Disability has been an invisible thematic area for development for a long period of time. As I said, however, the SDGs opened up the opportunity for creating visibility of the constituencies of persons with disabilities, particularly in the global south. In the upcoming summit, Ireland will play a key role in thinking through how persons with disabilities and their representative organisations can be part of that and how to reach out to organisations to hear the experiences of people on the ground. Much of the time, it can be through second-hand experience. For example, the organisation I work with is not an organisation representing persons with disabilities. It is an NGO that works with persons with disabilities as partners. It is really critical in respect of persons with disabilities and other community groups that our Government has a good approach to listening to the voices that are not generally heard. It is about trying to apply that as part of the process in the lead-up to the summit, which would be really critical. It is also about trying to highlight the connectivity of disability to climate change and war, to pick up on Deputy Stanton's comment. We have had the UN special rapporteur based here in Ireland. He is an Irishman. He has just published a number of reports, which are related, around the whole area of conflict and its impact on persons with disabilities and how conflict can create a cycle around disability. Last year, with Ireland within the Security Council, we had a very open dialogue with the Irish UN representatives in New York and the Security Council members around thinking about this whole area of civil protection and peacebuilding and how persons with disabilities can be part of that. We need to move away from thinking around disability from a charity perspective and purely from a needs-based perspective. Needs are critical, obviously, but it is really about starting to think about it sitting more into foreign policy. Persons with disabilities in Ireland are interested in foreign policy. Foreign policy impacts on persons with disabilities in the global south. We need to start making these connections in terms of how we do our work with the SDGs.