Ms Audrey Cahill:

On the first question about how many people are employed, as state, ours is an agency of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. The overall employment rate relating to staff in the Department who declared having a disability is 7%. We do not specifically have the data of every individual who has a disability in the WRC, given that there are hidden and obvious ones. We have people who require accommodations such as the Braille printer we referred to or spaces for their assistance dogs. We have those accommodations in place for people in our information centre in Carlow in particular. Where there is a physical need and it is obvious, we know. However, we unfortunately do not have data on those who have a hidden disability and have not requested specific reasonable accommodation.

All our sites are fully accessible to people with physical disabilities, visual impairments or whatever disability someone may present with. We need to know in advance if anything outside of the standard accessibility measures we have in place is required and, on the special accommodation section of the form, we have an unlimited amount of space for people to fill the data in. We will accommodate all manners of request, such as the light might need to be low in room, we might need an Irish Sign Language interpreter, we might need the parties to speak slower and break within a number of sentences and so on. It can get very detailed. Every specific accommodation is provided once we are of it in advance. When we are not aware of it in advance, our staff are well seasoned at dealing with it. Dealing with the equality legislation is not new to us. Our staff are well trained and react well on the day to support anybody who arrives with something we did not realise would need support. From that perspective, we have a great deal in place.

The Deputy is right that there is not a free legal aid system. However, 50% of all parties come unrepresented – both employers and employees.

It does not necessarily ever present as an issue where somebody with a disability would be at a disadvantage. In fact, I would say that our trained adjudicators, who are customer-facing people in that regard, would make more provision for the individual that has a disability and make sure that where a break is needed or translation is required at the last minute, we have the services available to us. I think that is it.