Mr. Adam Harris:

In terms of the DPO piece, from the point of view of our organisation, we aim to be a disabled persons organisation across the life cycle.

That is important because there can be far too much siloing of children and adults within our community but what we would like to see is to be able to scale much greater that child-voice piece within the organisation.

We are extremely proud of our youth leadership team. There are so many more young people who would like to be engaged with us. There are so many more young people who would like to be able to access our As We Are programme. That is something needs to happen, both within the autism community but, I am sure, more generally as well.

I really appreciate the question about under-represented groups because this is something, as an organisation, we give a lot of time to. I suppose intersectionality is so important because we see the scale of barriers that autistic young people face but when autistic young people are members of other minority groups as well, those challenges can increase exponentially.

We would like to do an awful lot more with our Traveller community. This year we have done a number of pieces of work, including with Pavee Point. We would like to build that out because there is a real invisibility of autistic Travellers within our community and that is of significant concern. I was delighted to see a reference to it within the autism innovation strategy because we need to build on that.

We do a lot of work in terms of LGBT autistic young. Indeed, we have specific groups for autistic LGBT young people.

We have been very proud of the work we have been doing supporting autistic migrants. That includes a webinar series, for example, that we held recently with Ukrainian autistic people and their parents who have come to Ireland. We all know how hard it is to navigate our supports. Can you imagine doing it with that language barrier having fled war? That is something we are very concerned about. Sometimes when people are from intersectional minorities, the State does not go that extra mile to help. If anything, it can be quicker to erect barriers. That is something we need to name and be aware of.

The other question I might address is in terms of social protection. We definitely see significant evidence of welfare stealth whereby people provide all the documentation and they are just rejected and sent back. What is concerning is the lack of empathy the system shows to families. We are talking about children's rights here and, certainly, how the Department is wording, for example, the domiciliary care allowance form, is entirely inappropriate. It is asking families to write about their children, often in a very dehumanising way. That is the only way people can get access to the funding, which might be critical for them to then get the supports they need, so we need to change that language. We need to change that culture. It is evident across the board, with all the tax credits and social protection supports. The idea that we still have an incapacitated child tax credit says a lot about the culture that we still need to shift.