Erin McGreehan (Fianna Fail)
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The witnesses are all very welcome to the committee this evening. We have covered a lot of the challenges with regard to the absolute necessity that we have equalisation in pay, multiannual funding and proper capital investment in physical infrastructure and transport. Huge extra costs that have been put on to organisations and services like those represented by the witnesses with respect to the cost of living. We are sitting here in the disability committee and advocating for extra funding and services but part of our remit is to ensure we have rights-based services that are about looking after the individual. They are contingent on each other because if we do not have the resources or the infrastructure, we are not delivering the service that is envisioned in the New Directions policy. That policy has been around for a quite a while, since 2012. We ratified the UNCRPD in 2018. Given the discrepancy in those years, from 2012 to now, do the witnesses think the New Directions policy has failed? If so, has it failed because you were basically given a document with fantastic, legitimate and proper policies and tools but with no resources?

The focused policy assessment on adult disability services is going on now. Do the witnesses think this could be a kind of stepping stone towards looking at those gaps, assessing them and auditing them in a way that says, "In my service, we have this; we do some things really well because we have whatever, and we start assessing it". Maybe I am being too ambitious. It is about looking at a service individually and saying that it is doing something really well and it has the capacity for that. On the flip side, another service might be doing something that another service is not doing well. Do the witnesses think that the new review - the new policy assessment - is going to open up those gaps and try and support the witnesses to facilitate them? We know they are absolutely important. A person's autonomy, will and preference is what we sitting here every week to push for. If we do not have staff to carry out and to listen, if we do not have infrastructure to have the safe space, and if we do not have transport to have that community engagement, as the witnesses said themselves, the entire circle is falling apart. That sounds very negative with regard to the services. I know the services in Louth - I deal with them and I deal with the service users - and I know they are fantastic. It is about pulling it out, trying to make it better, supporting staff and service users, and supporting the development of it into the ideal that we really want. The ideology is fantastic and our policies and wants are really important, but we do not have a method to get there. Do the witnesses think the Department is engaging adequately to get that method? That was a long-winded way to get to a very small point. I thank the witnesses.