Ms Siobhán McKenna:

There were two questions around the low rate of employment. We are joint last with Greece, so we are not alone when it comes to low levels of employment. There are structural and attitudinal barriers. That is irrespective of what sector or industry you work in. There are structural barriers in the types of jobs, the working week and tasks. For example, you cannot advertise a job in the Civil Service on a part-time basis. All jobs have to be advertised on a full-time basis. That will change. A person who wants to work but can perhaps work only 25 or 30 hours a week because of their disability is automatically ruled out from applying for those jobs unless they are prepared to start full time, get in, do their probation and negotiate with their line manager about scaling back their hours. That is all discretionary. It is business critical but also the line manager will decide. There are structural attitudes like that, along with buildings. Garda stations are notorious for being inaccessible because they tend to be in the oldest buildings in the town. There is work being done in this regard. When we place general grade people and they have mobility issues, we are not going to put them in a building that does not have facilities but that does not mean it does not happen - 90% of the building might be accessible, but the canteen or the front door might not be. Those are some of the structural barriers.

There are also the attitudinal barriers. We have a deficit model when it comes to people with disabilities. The first thing we think about is what they cannot do instead of what they could do if we modified or tweaked things to fit the job around them, as opposed to trying to fit them around the job. We are getting better at including that lived experience - the voice of people with disabilities - in our processes and policies. We spent all of last year working on a particular part of our process, the assignment and onboarding piece. We took a co-design approach to this which meant there were 100 people involved in that project who had disabilities, were experts in disability, experts in co-design, hiring managers across the system and public sector organisations outside of the Civil Service. We all came together and discussed the challenges and how to find solutions. All of that was driven by the lived experience of the people in those groups. We will, I hope, continue to do that. We survey every candidate who comes through our organisation. In that survey we ask them about how they found the process, if it was acceptable, if they got the supports they needed, if we were efficient and if we communicated too much or too little. We have a constant feedback loop.

We are working to get not just disabled people, but people with a migrant background or whatever lived experience, and trying to integrate them more into our process and how we design policies and so o n.