Ms Tara Matthews:

We run understanding sessions with companies, several of which we have done in the past number of weeks. They are all free. We organise free understanding sessions for companies. We do talks in schools. Again, we provide those all free of charge.

The Cathaoirleach mentioned the autism card and the autism alert card. I have copies here. We send those free of charge to anybody who wants one. We get a lot of feedback from parents asking for a card. They say that at least if it is on their child and something happens, they can put the name and phone number there so people can have some understanding that the child has different needs or extra needs. The cards work very well.

During Covid we developed a Covid card for when an autistic person was not comfortable wearing a mask, rather than having to keep trying to explain themselves, they could show the card and it was less intrusive. It was easier for the person who was talking to them to understand what was happening and why they may not be comfortable wearing a mask, rather than getting into the confrontations that seemed to happen with some people during Covid. We do an awful lot of work like that.

Every single day of the week, we are responding to emails from everybody in society. We talk to new parents who have just walked out of a diagnosis with no information about where to go or what to do and we provide information to them. We provide information to adults who may think they have autism. They might have gone to their GP but there is nothing for them and they want to know what to do next, how to navigate and move forward and how to get help and work out what is going on. We get calls from older brothers and sisters where an autistic person is living at home with elderly parents. They say this cannot continue and want to know how to navigate it, where to go or even who to start talking to. They want to know whose responsibility it is to help them. They do not know where to start. Every day of the week, we get calls from people asking "How do we do this, what is the next place we look at, who do we need to talk to?". We get calls regularly from State agencies, people who work in the HSE or Tusla, asking what services are available in their area because they have a family that needs help and they want to know what they can tell them. It is not unusual for us to get emails like that. Every day of the week, we have emails coming in with all that variety of different queries. People do not know where to go. They do not know where to get the information. It is not there for them. It is a hard place to navigate. We have even had schools ringing us asking who their SENO is. The level of information that is not out there is mind-boggling.