Mr. Greg Swift:

The entrepreneurship programme for persons with disabilities that was mentioned was developed by Professor Thomas Cooney from TUD in conjunction with several other organisations. I attended a number of workshops, involving various organisations, to develop that programme. The LEOs support that programme and are a partner on it. We supply mentors to the programme and also do some one-to-one activities with individuals on the programme. There is a "Dragon's Den"-type process at the end of the programme and one of our colleagues attends that, where there is presentation of LEO supports directly to the participants.

On the issue of access and Workability, the offices tend to take queries or applications from all sorts of participants. The number of people with a disability is recorded as being around 1 million, which is approximately one in five of the population. We are constantly getting people with disabilities applying to attend our courses, many of which are online these days. We regularly get people ringing our offices and if they make us aware that they have a disability, we will go about trying to provide whatever is required to enable their engagement with us. We have a panel of mentors in place and if it does not seem likely that people will be able attend one of the courses that we direct them to, we can assign a mentor to them and one-to-one activity can take place. Again, if there are special requirements, we can try to meet them.

Our website is being redesigned at the moment. We expect it to reflect best practice but it will be some time before that is in place. It is currently being redesigned and we hope to have it in place in the coming year or two. It will probably be two years before it is ready but we will be addressing some of the issues in the interim. An audit is being done on the current site and we will be trying to address issues that come up, but the site is not totally fixable.

On the course, while it does get oversubscribed, there is a screening process to determine who is best suited to attend. Again, there are those others engagements that LEOs throughout the country have to provide services.