Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for meeting representatives of the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities. University is not for every person, with or without an intellectual disability, but it should be an option. It gives dignity to have a student card, be able to be on the Frisbee team, or whatever it is a young person chooses, and be properly included and given the confidence. I met a young man who is a graduate of the centre last weekend and now has a full-time permanent position in a commercial firm in Dublin. He has worked through the pandemic, in his own way, and is now a board member of Inclusion Ireland as a self-advocate. Those programmes give confidence because of the inclusion and dignity they afford to young people. They give them the opportunity, instead of assuming it is okay to send them to day care or something of that nature, to work in commercial companies, have a lanyard, pay tax, have the dignity of grumbling on a Monday morning getting on a bus the same as everybody else. That is real inclusion. We must conceive intellectual disability in the same way as everything else. I thank the Minister for his work so far and ask him to respond to those points.

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