Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I wish Mr. Harris a good morning and thank him for his presentation. As always, he focuses us on what we should be doing, on what the issues are and on what is important as we come to preparing our report. I hope the committee, in its meetings over the year, has helped to create awareness, and more than that I hope it has given autistic people a chance to air their concerns and talk about the barriers in society they face. I have learned so much in the past year and I thank all the people who presented at the committee for that.

Mr. Harris is right in saying we need legislation because it is wrong that when a general election is called and a Government changes everything has to start from scratch again. The committee has worked well with cross-party support and I hope that whatever has been achieved, if it is not down in legislation it will be followed up by the next Government and I will give a commitment from my party that if that was the case we would do that.

Mr. Harris mentioned the autism innovation strategy that the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte is working on. He says: "it has faced significant opposition from Government Departments in the past". I ask Mr. Harris to expand on that because that would be concerning. I wonder if that is similar to something we have come across in the Committee on Disability Matters in that when you engage with a lot of Departments on what they do in disability they say there is one Department that deals with disability and they do not seem to understand that everybody has a responsibility. That is the case with autism as well.

I refer to the lack of regulation of psychology and applied behaviour analysis, ABA, as well. There was a good and informative discussion on this at the Committee on Disability Matters but until the autistic community supports this type of therapy or until it supports autistic people and is properly regulated, it does not have a place in society. I invite Mr. Harris to expand on that as well.