Ms Margaret McCabe:

I have been requested by the committee to discuss the role of the Public Appointments Service, PAS, in supporting the development of equal opportunities for people with disabilities in employment in Ireland. PAS is the recruitment and resourcing service provider for client organisations in the civil and public service and is responsible for the sourcing, assessment and delivery of quality candidates to those clients. PAS is required to work within the codes of practice of the Commission for Public Service Appointments, CPSA, and the Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Act 2004, under which we must ensure that "standards of probity, merit, equity and fairness" are met in all of our recruitment processes.

We seek to achieve fair and valid recruitment and assessment processes. In our strategy, we set out to be "recognised as a centre of excellence in recruitment, trusted by those we serve". Equality, diversity and inclusion, EDI, is a core theme throughout our strategy and in achieving our goals. We are fully committed to equality of opportunity for all and ensuring routes to career opportunities are accessible to all potential candidates. We have taken action in a number of key areas. We launched our EDI strategy in 2021, outlining three key change areas of focus to ensure inclusive recruitment for all candidates.

As the centralised recruiter for the public service and Civil Service, we have a key role in supporting our clients to build a public sector workforce that embraces inclusion and reflects the growing diversity of wider Irish society. To achieve our goals in this area we established an EDI unit, led by an externally recruited EDI specialist. The EDI unit includes a disability champion who offers advice and support internally in PAS and externally by answering any candidate queries. The disability champion can supportively discuss any facet of the process with candidates and facilitates access for those with disabilities. Reasonable accommodation supports put in place to aid disabled candidates to perform to the best of their ability during the recruitment process are a key part of this work. We have worked to continually improve the reasonable accommodations process across all stages of our recruitment process from application to assessment and assignment.

In order to ensure all candidates can apply for public service roles through publicjobs.ie, we maintain an accessible website and provide a range of support material for potential candidates in relation to accessibility and reasonable accommodations. We have made extensive efforts to develop practices and procedures that support those with disabilities in gaining employment in the public sector and adopt a mature approach to assessing candidates with disabilities and assessing their reasonable accommodations. We have a high level of professional expertise in this area, with a team of work and organisational psychologists in place. We train all our board members in all areas of best practice across all nine areas of equality legislation. We developed e-learning modules on unconscious bias and interviewing candidates with disabilities to ensure that our board members have the required training to allow them to assess all candidates fairly. An external audit of the processes used by PAS found that PAS can be considered an exemplar in much of the provision it makes for candidates with disabilities.

A recent review of data was conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, into data held by PAS on candidates who declared a disability in the application and assignment stage from 2019 to 2021. It confirmed that candidates with disabilities are under-represented at all stages of our process, but that those who do apply are successful, proportionately. Some 2.8% of applications received between 2019 and 2021 were from individuals who self-identified as having a disability, with 2.6% of assignees declaring a disability, well below the representation of people with a disability in the working population as a whole. Our research shows that candidates with disabilities perform just as well as candidates without disabilities across our assessment processes and while our aim is to maintain those standards, we recognise that we need to improve our attraction rates for disabled candidates.

To combat the under-representation of candidates with disabilities, we have long supported the delivery of AHEAD’s well-established willing able and mentoring, WAM, programme and the Oireachtas work learning, OWL, work placement programme. More recently, we have taken a co-design approach to reimagining the reasonable accommodations process for candidates with disabilities, focusing on the assignment and on-boarding stage. Project partners, Tilting the Lens, a disability-led consultancy, brought more than 100 people from 30 organisations across the civil and public sector together to participate in a collaborative design methodology, one that prioritised the experiences and voices of disabled colleagues. This group included clients, candidates, design experts, disability advocates and unions. Two Civil Service-wide town hall meetings were convened as part of this project with more than 700 employees in attendance. The resulting blueprint for welcoming and supporting disabled employees in the Civil Service and public service addresses key challenges identified at the assignment and on-boarding stages. The blueprint includes nine recommendations in the areas of people and culture, processes and systems, and policy and governance. They are designed to help public bodies implement and report on transparent actions in order to achieve long-term positive change in the assignment and on-boarding of candidates with disabilities.

A large number of the recommendations are outside the direct control of PAS, but we have identified Departments and units that will be able to implement some of these recommendations. A number of key recommendations are directly relevant to PAS and relate to how we can improve and streamline the candidate experience across the recruitment process and optimise the assignment experience. The Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform has already begun to implement some of the recommendations relevant to it, including a disability policy audit and a review of the role of the disability liaison officer, DLO.

Some 22 % of people declared a disability in the last census. If we are to be a truly representative workforce, one that reflects the reality of Irish society, we need to get better at encouraging and supporting people with disabilities to access meaningful careers in the public sector. PAS is committed to playing its part in this collective effort.