Ms Susanne Rogers:

The rates of exclusion of individuals from the disabled community are extraordinarily high. I am conscious that there is a lot of stuff that can be done outside this committee. People should retain their medical cards and travel passes. It is things like that. My cousin has cerebral palsy and is not going to get better. She is a wheelchair user. However, as soon as she got full-time employment, those things were withdrawn. She has been terrified to enter full-time employment.

This is about life-long learning and continuous engagement. Child poverty is damaging throughout a person's lifetime and affects his or her ability to engage with the education system right the way through. I have a teenager in secondary school. The school is super diverse. It is a DEIS Educate Together school in a Dublin suburb. You name it, it is there. It is brilliant. However, there is a struggle to keep students in school for leaving certificate and we can see that the parents who are struggling to keep their children in school are probably the parents who do not have upper secondary or third level education themselves. It is the continuation of the story and trying to break that.

As to what the point is and why people would bother, I have here a piece from the Youth Council which I printed off for another reason.

Its report on the lives of Irish 18- to 29-year-olds in a financial context shows that in a person's late teens and early 20s, optimism prevails. We might have received our degree, left school and done all these things, and then the reality of the situation comes as a surprise to many. The report shows that the notion of hard work and education as a surefire path to achieving financial goals is being questioned by this generation. It is all linked in.