Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Thanks Pierce.
Irish TV are delighted to be in the lovely surroundings of the City Hall here in Dublin this afternoon,
for the IASE Best Practice Awards of 2013.
[Music]
I am delighted to be joined now by Dublin's Lord Mayor, Oisin Quinn.
Thank you for joining us Oisin.
It's a pleasure to be here and looking forward to this event.
It's an important event event in the year, so I am delighted to welcome everyone to the City Hall.
This is one of the best building in Dublin, the old Royal Exchange, it's actually where the City Council meet,
so it's a great civic space and an appropriate civic venue for this event today.
We have 7 award winners today going to be presented with an award, a huge opportunity
on the 3rd of December today, International Day for People with Disabilities.
We are delighted to be here, we have a fantastic crowd and it's going to be a wonderful celebration of success,
breaking down barriers and creating equal opportunities for people with disabilities in the employment sector in Ireland.
It's a really important issue for me and for the government here in Ireland, that people who have a disability
have a good chance of getting employment, either on a full or part-time basis.
We are trying to build up a partnership with employers, so that employers who take on someone
with a disability get support.
And on the other side we give the person with the disability coaching and mentoring, so that both the employer
and the individual with the disability will know what to expect.
When they invited me to be patron, I really didn't know what was involved in this, but its' a huge honour.
The single most important thing that you can give someone in any country is choice, when you give them a job,
you give them choice. It gives an opportunity for people with disabilities to be included in the workforce
and to actually go out there and make a real, real difference.
IrishJobs.ie is the largest recruitment website in Ireland, so for us it's an ideal partnership for the very reason
that we promote jobs, we have over 10.000 jobs on IrishJobs, to jobseekers.
This is a really good partnership for us and to promote the message that there's jobs out there for everybody,
no matter who you are.
[Music]
As an association we take on the role nationally in terms of working with government organisations
and policy makers. We need outstanding people on the ground who get out there and make employers
aware of the importance of employing people with disabilities and have more inclusive work sites.
And we really need people like that who are going to promote the model as well to people with disabilities
and to their families.
We won the award for supported employment service of the year, so we are absolutely delighted with that.
The award just recognises the supported employment service that we deliver to people
with disabilities and the support we give to employers.
Just received an award today, it was a fantastic achievement, I was nominated for the company mentor
of the year award, from the Irish Association of Supported Employment.
So yeah, I'm delighted I won the award.
We have been involved in this project now for a year and a half. It started of with work experience
for 6 weeks and thankfully it has worked into full-time employment for 4 employees,
which is great, across the Group here in Ireland.
We're hoping to get it across the board now to London and to New York as well.
It is fantastic to be able to highlight the potential for people with disabilities when given the proper
opportunity to demonstrate what they can contribute to any company.
We had a great celebration here in City Hall.
On the International Day for People with Disabilities; December 3rd every year celebrates that.
And this years theme is "Breaking down barriers and opening doors" and today was a great example of
how we do that through introducing people with disabilities into the workplace, through services that
are out there to do that, there are service personnel, the employers themselves and the workplace mentors,
they all got awarded today, there efforts were all acknowledged and it is a great celebration.
These are the days that you kind of you get to celebrate yourself and us as an executive get to
celebrate the work that we do all year.