Dr. Rosalyn Tamming:

On the monitoring issues and the softer advisory side that Dr. Hartney spoke about, we take every opportunity we can to push the obligations Departments have. Many Departments are developing their new statements of strategy. We mention the Web accessibility directive, Departments’ obligations under the Irish Sign Language Act, Part 3 and Part 5, and their potential obligations under the new upcoming European accessibility legislation. Therefore, we take every opportunity.

For both the national disability inclusion strategy, NDIS, and the comprehensive employment strategy, we produce an independent assessment report. It is not quite a matter of the monitoring of the strategy but it does concern highlighting the good things that happen in the year and the weaker things on which the focus would need to be in future years. There are a set of indicators for the national disability inclusion strategy. We examined those at the end of the strategy. Departments and agencies have been approached for comment before we publish. There are 58 unique indicators. The problem is many of them are process indicators – an example might be based on our having set up a working group to do X, Y or Z – but very few are outcome indicators. Of the outcome indicators that exist, data are not available for several.

In developing the monitoring strategy for the new UNCRPD implementation strategy or the new monitoring framework, we really need to focus on the high-level outcome indicators. The process ones are all important but are at a lower level and perhaps should not get the attention they got in the last strategy. We should really focus on the outcome ones.

On the matter of disabled persons' organisations, DPOs, I completely agree it is an evolving area within Ireland. Five years ago in the NDA, we were not really talking about it, but we produced a research paper in the past couple of years examining what other countries have done. We have produced guidance for Departments to highlight the fact they need to be engaging with DPOs. The question they come to us with concerns how they should do it. That is a difficult question to answer because Departments have limited time and resources to do their consultations and engagement. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth set up the Disability Participation and Consultation Network to try to fulfil its obligations under Article 4.3 of the UNCRPD. That has had limited success. The Department actually asked us to review it. We are in the middle of the review and hope to have a report by the end of June. As part of the review, we will have a series of recommendations considering what structure needs to be in place to ensure we are in compliance and what will work within the Irish setting, taking into consideration other structures that exist, such as the disability stakeholders group and the disability advisory committee within the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. One wants everything to work together to lead to an improvement, not to have overlap that is not necessary.

DPOs themselves have called for a register and a way of defining a DPO. Nobody has taken on that role. It is not for us to say; DPOs self-declare. Other countries have checklists based on what is laid out within general comment No. 7 of the UNCRPD, which states the relevant organisations must comprise mostly people with a disability and be led by people with a disability. There are other factors, however, including national, local and regional considerations. Therefore, there is a lot of work to be done in this area. The funding, which has been mentioned, represents a gap. Some DPOs are established for quite a long time and have good governance systems that enable them to apply for funding, whereas others are very small and run on shoestring budgets. It is very difficult for the latter to engage, so there has to be parity.

We developed last year a toolkit and guidance on participation and consultation with people with disabilities. It examines some of these issues.