Mr. Damien Walshe:

Climate change is the decisive challenge facing humanity and urgent action is required to stabilise the planet for this and future generations. Failure to act nationally and globally will have disastrous effects on the lives of billions of people. Climate change does not discriminate. It does not pick and choose who should be affected due to our mishandling of our home. Discrimination is the job of our species.

As a national disabled persons' organisation, DPO, we are concerned that failure to treat climate change as a global emergency will have even greater consequences for people who are pushed to the edges of society, and precisely on the lives of disabled people nationally and internationally. Independent Living Movement Ireland's vision, as a cross-impairment DPO, is an Ireland where disabled persons have liberty and self-determination over all aspects of their lives to fully participate in an inclusive society. We recognise and welcome that measures need to be urgently developed to drastically reduce our carbon emissions. However, it is crucial that any climate change actions do not undermine our commitments to the inclusion of disabled people in Ireland under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD.

We appreciate that the development of climate change actions could be transformative. Investment in sustainable housing and effective and efficient transportation systems are key to moving from environmental disaster to a more sustainable future. However, there is an urgent need to engage with DPOs to ensure that any public investment is fully inclusive and ensure that Exchequer funds are designed to meet the needs of everyone. Climate change and environmentalism are as much about social justice as about correcting the damage we have done to our planet. Disabled people are often disregarded in the discourses and decisions of this environmental social justice. We are frequently seen as an afterthought or an energy burden rather than being part of a whole societal transformative effect for our shared future.

Analysis of disability inclusion in national climate commitments and policies shows that few state parties to the Paris Agreement currently refer to disabled people in their climate mitigation policies. The report notes that the failure to include disabled people in climate mitigation actions may lead to outcomes that are inconsistent with our rights. In Ireland we note that the Climate Action Plan 2023, Changing Ireland for the Better, has a solitary reference to disabled people in relation to minimum levels of disabled parking. This systematic invisibility of disabled people in climate planning reflects a lack of structured engagement with DPOs on this issue.

The lack of engagement with DPOs on local and national plans to decarbonise Irish society has and will have unintentional impacts on our lives. Nationally and internationally, environmental grassroots organisations have historically have been led by non-disabled people, who although genuine attempting to save the environment do not take into account those with less access to resources than themselves. For example, ILMI recognises the need to reduce our carbon footprint by trying to reduce reliance on cars in towns and cities. However, due to the lack of engagement with DPOs, as per State commitments under the UNCRPD, some measures are having unintended negative consequences on the lives of disabled people. Hard-fought gains by disabled people over decades in terms of the safety of our pedestrian areas and parking spaces have been steadily eroded over the past two years. Temporary changes to our public areas made during the phases of managing Covid-19 are now translating into sometimes unwelcome permanency. Disabled people are being denied access to our towns and cities by pavements restricting our ease of movement due to new allowances permitted for unregulated external dining. Why not wholly pedestrianise these spaces for the real inclusion of all rather than the enjoyment of the few?

Our disabled parking spaces are being removed to other locations, with no reference to where and why the original location was a place of most assistance to facilitate disabled people to access the centres of towns and cities. The promotion of floating bus stops, which impede disabled people and people with reduced mobility in safely accessing public transport, and the promotion of dangerous "shared spaces" are directly impacting our ability as disabled people to participate with our accustomed ease of freedom in society. These are but a sample of a massive problem of restricting the mobility of tens of thousands of disabled people and older people.

ILMI recognises the need to promote active mobility and reduce our national carbon footprint. What alarms us, however, is that many measures which were initially trialled as experimental are now being implemented with little or no recognition of earlier objections to their design, and with no new consultation with disabled people through representative DPOs as per the State's commitments under Article 4.3 of the UNCRPD. This has led to a mix of local initiatives without meaningful consultation with disabled people, resulting in a lack of uniformity and hybrid measures which undermine disabled people’s right to access and inclusion. Article 9 of the UNCRPD specifically places obligations on states to take appropriate measures:

to ensure to persons with disabilities access, on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including information and communications technologies and systems, and to other facilities and services open or provided to the public, both in urban and in rural areas. These measures, which shall include the identification and elimination of obstacles and barriers to accessibility

I will now pass over to my colleague Mr. Kearns.