Mr. John Sherwin:

Part of the problem is that many services delivered to disabled people and deaf people are delivered from a welfare perspective, based on a medical model, rather than from a rights perspective. This results in a paternalistic provision of services with an assumption that people will try to take advantage of the system. The work and access scheme allows for 24 hours per year interpretation time for a deaf person in the workplace. It could be extremely simple, whereby a workplace or deaf person applies for the scheme, it is awarded and at the end of the year they submit 24 hours worth of invoices. Instead, as Ms Quigley said, there is only room for the name of one interpreter. I do not know whether any of the members have ever booked an interpreter, but there are 140 of them in the country. The deaf population in Finland requires 500 to satisfy services. The demand is quite high. People take whatever interpreter they can get. They cannot be pre-booked.

With respect, when the Deputy says he is disappointed with the results because Departments and State services are trying to improve services, we can absolutely see that, but they are not trying to improve them through meaningful engagement and co-creation. We can see why these programmes are not working and why the results are bad. It is because we are not involved in the services about us. The work and access scheme is one example. There was a consultation at the start of the development of the scheme and then the scheme was delivered and it is not right. We then have to go about campaigning to change the scheme. If there had been a process of co-creation, where we were involved throughout the process of developing the scheme, it would have had a much better chance of being correct. We talk about the many pilots around the country that are producing exciting results or doing interesting things, but what happens with the pilots? We have had several pilots for services in the deaf community, including an on-demand interpreting app, but following the pilot nothing happened.

As an example of something going right and something going wrong, the DPO Network has engaged with the Department of equality in co-creating the new national disability strategy and it is going well. We are working through problems and providing good feedback. Following the collapse of the pilot for the on-demand app in February, we approached the Department of Social Protection for a meeting about how to improve the spirit of meaningful engagement between DPOs and the Department. Since February, I have continued to email and ask the Department for a meeting on that subject, but it has not been able to make time to reply to those emails.

It is true that there is genuine interest in improving services, but the realisation does not seem to be there that without meaningful engagement and co-creation, some of the time and some of the budget are being spent on going in the wrong direction. The level of frustration about that results in, for example, the recent paper from Independent Living Movement Ireland, ILMI, on how disability budgets are managed and looking for disabled people to control and manage those budgets. Without our input, those budgets are not being spent as effectively as they could be. I am afraid there is engagement but much of it is still tokenistic. We require a much better attitude across government to co-creation to get this right for everyone's benefit.