Mr. Desmond Kenny:

When one looks at the strategy and while so much can be done with the heavy lifting at the health end, I have noticed that in replies to parliamentary questions, it reaches into other areas because where people live and how they live is multi-Government or multistranded. However, much of how one lives or how one is accepted into an included lifestyle has improved considerably over the years and decades of my involvement or experience of inclusion. My involvement started in one of the segregated special schools, which now form part of the redress board's problems. It led to more segmented special-type services such as limited employment opportunities. That expanded as the years and decades passed and I believe we have become a more inclusive society. We are now just about accepted as being equal and the day we are accepted as being superior will be most interesting. I only jest but it is a question of to whom one is equal when one is perceived as having arrived somewhere.

We have the care services and an infrastructure of society in which one will see we have level access, which is a barrier-free environment for all. While that started as a wheelchair lobby, it was then realised that people have ambulatory-type problems in walking, as do women with buggies and mothers with buggies and, consequently, a barrier-free environment for all helps people who have the greatest need. Just as visibility and colour contrast help low-vision people, it also assures one fairly quickly that the yellow rails are there to be grabbed if one is to travelling on the Luas and so on. People will always be at a disadvantage and I do not think it is prejudice; I think it is ignorance. It is people's need and wish to do the right thing that actually makes them clumsy in doing stupid things, such as asking does one want sugar or does he take sugar. We have a society with organisations in which we and the Government in indirect ways have invested in the provision of an infrastructural society that has audio pedestrian crossings and that now has in place a taken-for-granted infrastructure that has been won. There are announcements on trains that started with us - when they are working. I note they do not work all the time on the Cork train on which I was travelling recently and the Chairman might do something about that. However, while such announcements help us, they were provided initially at our request. In working through the Government and through European legislation, much has been improved and a lot is happening in respect of taking the acceptance of disability and vision impairment into something that is more normal and into creating and building rights around it. I thank the joint committee and the Deputies who have come before them for allowing this to happen.