Mr. Adam Harris:

I am delighted that the Deputy found the training useful. The Leinster House autism friendly project is about making the precincts of this building accessible. The by-product is that Deputies and Senators can benefit from the training, which hopefully will also inform policy formulation. What people do not know they do not know. It provides the opportunity to see the world through an autism lens, as opposed to thinking about autism when we are talking about autism. When we are talking about public transport, we need to consider how that relates to autistic people. When we are talking to education, we need to consider how that relates to autistic people. We need to proactively autism-proof if we want to be inclusive. Hopefully that is where the training can add some value.

The discussion of structural discrimination is really important. The discrimination experienced by many autistic people is different from that experienced by other minorities. Not many people get up out of bed in the morning and say, "I don't like autistic people, and as a result, I'm going to discriminate." It often comes from a lack of knowledge and a lack of respect, but also from a lack of a reference point. We discriminate without realising that we are discriminating in how we design the systems and the world we live in. Critical to this is the autistic voice. Looking at the history of autism, it is a pretty dark space. For most of the history of autism, things were done to autistic people instead of for autistic people. One of the really positive shifts we have seen over the past ten years is autistic people and their families being listened to increasingly. That highlights to me that if we want to end structural discrimination, we need to create more opportunities to support autistic people to play that leadership role and to be able to advocate. Advocating does not just mean coming to a forum like this; It means people being able to advocate for themselves about what they want for lunch. It means being able to decide where they want to work. It means being able to deal with issues, local and national. More needs to be done to support autistic voice. Compared with other countries - this also applies to disabled persons organisations - we are at a very early stage in building that movement and resourcing that movement.

More could be done in that regard.

It is great to see Waterford working towards becoming an autism-friendly city. It will be a very exciting project.

The point around safety is really important. In our survey, a significant proportion of people were not able to say they felt safe in their communities. The amazing thing about some of the measures for autistic people is that they are about being able to use facilities. It might be having access to a quiet space, for example, if people are feeling overwhelmed. It is not just about using a facility on a particular day; it is about people feeling confident and safe in knowing there are accommodations there and things will be okay if the world becomes overwhelming for them. That sense of safety is linked to judgment and attitude. It is also linked to the need for forward planning. One of the challenges around making our society autism-friendly from a design point of view is that it cannot be codified in the way other forms of accessibility can be codified. It is more about the need to create frameworks in which we think about design. Often, that did not happen in the past, which is where many of the problems emerge.