Erin McGreehan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank everyone for their contributions this morning. I apologise that I was jumping in and out of the meeting because I had to be at a few different places this morning.

Many of the issues have been covered. In my absence, many of my thoughts have probably also been covered. It goes to show, as we learned in last week’s meeting, that in moments of crisis, the most vulnerable suffer most. There is that old saying that we learn at school, which is, “Fail to prepare and prepare to fail”. As Dr. McDonagh has said, we are in an emergency and things are not perfect, but we have not prepared for an emergency.

I looked up the national emergency guidelines from the Department of Defence, in which there are only two mentions of disabilities. The Government also has different emergency guidelines, and disabilities are not counted in those. These issues are not disability proofed. Mr. Harris mentioned that earlier on. If we start at the point where we are ignoring people with disabilities, we will never be able to look after those citizens as best we should. We have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic that we must look after so many of our most vulnerable.

I apologise if my questions have been covered already. I have some more practical questions around what is happening currently. Are the services collecting the data that we need to follow through? We have some organisations coming into the committee. We have great organisations such as WALK, which are standing up to work with and help people. However, are there State organisations that are acting to collect the data, to find out the various needs, to allocate for them and to check in with people? As Dr. McDonagh has said, are there safeguards? Are our refugees given information about their rights, entitlements and what they can be expected to not have to put up with? They are in such a vulnerable position. Are all of our refugees empowered to know? Have we got the framework in place to empower our refugees to be advocate for themselves, so that they can go to the person who is best placed to help them? Is that framework in place? If it is not, it is a terrible indictment of us.