Ms Ger McTavish:

I thank Senator Clonan for his question. When we look at participation for persons with disabilities in sport and physical activity, we look at where they began. As the Senator suggested, it is physical activity in gyms. Gyms have increased the number of people with disabilities in their membership. We have worked very closely with Active Disability Ireland, which has designed facility resources and guidelines for outdoor as well as indoor gyms. Active Disability Ireland has those toolkits for all facilities.

It also works very closely with local sports partnerships. We would see the first gateway for anyone with a disability is to begin at their local grassroots club. That could also be their local sports partnership initiative or participation.

We have over 29 local sports partnerships who engage with community services, occupational therapists and physiotherapists. They engage with the local gym and are looking at adaptive equipment to put into the local gym. That is what active disability we are supporting. It is the training and education framework around the personnel in the gym to participate and it is also looking at how we can engage more services for people with disabilities coming into not only the local sports partnership clubs, but also to reach out to the Irish special schools. There is a cohort specifically looking at the Irish Special Schools Sports Council, which we work very closely with and give resources and training. We also give it funding to support programmes in the special schools. People can see the activities not only in their schools, but in their clubs and local gyms as well.

We have seen those programmes grow. We are currently starting to work with CP-Life Research Centre, which does a lot of work in specific gym programmes and will be getting a pilot programme in the coming years to look at how we can encourage more people with disabilities to go to their local gym and to buddy up with a member in the gym, or we can recruit volunteers to support them while they are in the gym. These are projects we are currently working on.

Through the local sports partnership we have seen many specific initiatives in gyms, clubs and other areas that we can work closely with. My colleague, Mr. McDermott, might have more to add.