Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 16 May 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Autism

Autism Policy: Discussion (Resumed)

Dr. Gerald Craddock:

It is up on our website. I can send the link. We published the report just before Christmas. We have to report every three years to the commission but we produce a yearly report.

We will be holding our board meeting on Thursday and Friday this week, so we should have our second report released, all going well, in the next two weeks.

We had all the local authorities and all the third level colleges in a hierarchy or "lowerarchy", if there is such a word. The phone started to ring rapidly. They wanted to move up the pecking order. We have seen quite an improvement in the accessibility of websites and mobile applications. It is getting that information out and also publish or be damned. Getting the information into the public domain that a website is not up to scratch has created quite a momentum among public bodies. Some of the work we do includes compiling the annual report on the percentage of people with disabilities, overseeing the implementation of the Irish Sign Language Act, which is a new job we got from the Government, and dealing with heritage sites. There is quite a bit of work, so we are seeing how we can bring this together so we can give a composite picture of where an organisation is across a number of sectors. Revision of the Disability Act would help, if we could get more specifics into the Disability Act regarding our monitoring functions as things have moved on quite considerably since 2005 when the Act was written.