"I would imagine you are five to 10 years ahead of us in picking up issues, but there is not the same access to services as we have in the UK."
Trevor Boyle, of PHAB Northern Ireland, has encapsulated in one sentence a key difference between the situation of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Services are more readily available to disabled people in Northern Ireland, but disabled people in the South are more ready to assert themselves and to demand rights.
That difference is important to people like Trevor Boyle whose job is to promote integration between disabled and able-bodied people (the letters PHAB stand for Physically Handicapped and AbleBodied, a name given to the organisation in the 1950s but which is never spelled out now in its literature as it is seen to be patronising and unacceptable).
"It is very frustrating working with young people, as we do, when you see their expectations are very, very low because they have been told that they are disabled people," says Mr Boyle.
Disabled people in the South may be more assertive, because they have had to be, in their battle for services, but perhaps they would like to have some of the problems of the disability sector in the North. "I just marvel at the way they can get money for services," says Roger Acton of the Disability Federation of Ireland, talking about disability organisations in the North.
He believes the absence of normal politics from Northern Ireland for so many years meant that voluntary and community organisations got a level of access to government departments which would usually only be given to politicians. With that, there came an enviable ability to get funding. With normal politics returning, and politicians moving to fill that gap, he suspects the disability movement could turn to campaigning and fighting for rights.
People in the South might also envy the greater availability of services in the North, services which by and large are provided by the state.
Disability spokesmen and women in Northern Ireland point out that there can be problems obtaining an assessment which would allow a person to get residential care, that community care services have been reduced or stopped because of budget restrictions, and that it can be difficult to prove one's eligibility for benefits from a sometimes baffling system.
One of the key differences between Northern Ireland and the Republic lies in the way in which services are organised. In the North, services such as residential and day-care facilities tend to be provided by the state. In the South, voluntary organisations and religious orders are still major providers of services, though with the bulk of their spending financed by the State.
As Roger Acton sees it, Northern Ireland is still largely in the grip of an approach which sees people with disabilities as people with a medical problem. In the South, on the other hand, disability is coming to be seen as a political, social and economic issue.
But attitudes are changing in the disability movement in the North, too, as Trevor Boyle's comments and his enthusiasm for an equality and rights-based approach suggest. And Monica Wilson, director of Disability Action, which employs 90 full-time staff in Northern Ireland, sees herself as working within the area of discrimination, rights and equality.
"People with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as people who are able-bodied," she says. "In Northern Ireland the unemployment rate for Catholic males is twice that of non-Catholic males. The same urgency and status should be given to tackling the unemployment of people with disabilities, but the issue is not being taken as seriously."
But it is still noticeable, from a Southern point of view, that the complaints in the North are about equality and rights and not about such issues as waiting lists that seem to go on for ever.
Many people in the South would gladly swap their assertiveness for some of that.
Tomorrow: As one family moves South for a better service for their autistic child, what does the future hold for disability services on both sides of the Border?