Professor Eilion?ir Flynn:

I thank the Chair. It is my pleasure to make this statement on behalf of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy at the University of Galway on the subject of inclusive, human rights-based social protection for disabled people. In accordance with Article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the purpose of social protection measures is to ensure an adequate standard of living for persons with disabilities. This component of the convention’s broader purpose is to ensure the rights and dignity of disabled people are fully respected in society. As such, social protection measures must ensure that disabled people do not fall below the minimum floor necessary to maintain a life of dignity. To achieve this, it is important to carry out a comprehensive review of existing social protection measures for disabled people in Ireland and consider how they can be reframed.

Many of the existing social welfare payments, such as disability allowance and blind pension, were first introduced on the assumption that disabled people could never work on the open labour market and needed financial compensation for their impairment. While we know such beliefs are outdated and clearly wrong, we still need to interrogate why paid employment is viewed as the main mechanism through which we, as a society, value human endeavour and determine who is deserving of social protection. For this reason, it is important to explore social protection mechanisms that are not based on a medical model of impairment, nor on a fixed notion of contribution to society, such as universal basic income schemes, and consider how these might apply or be adapted to ensure full equality for disabled people. At the same time, we must recognise the additional costs disabled people face, regardless of their employment status, including higher energy costs, transport, and specialised equipment, many of which are not currently met through existing social protection schemes. The notion of a cost-of-disability social protection payment has been recommended in Ireland as far back as the report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities in 1996, yet that has still not been progressed, despite economic evidence of its necessity and utility.

It is important to acknowledge the need to radically overhaul systems of assessment for disability-based social protection payments. Such payments have been criticised in several countries by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for being overly medicalised.

Many of the measurements used for them are based on a static understanding of impairment, assuming that the person's experience is the same from day to day. For many disabled people, however, the tasks they are able to do vary dramatically from day to day due to a wide range of factors, including the environment and the supports available. Not everyone's impairment is the same each day. We need to recognise this in the measurements we use for social protection and in the supports we provide through our social protection system. The WHO has attempted to address these issues with medicalised assessment in its new Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0. While this is not a perfect system, it should be explored for adaptation in the Irish context. It focuses on the functionality of disabled people - what they can do and what they can get with assistance. For all these changes, it is important to engage directly with disabled people, through organisations led and governed by them, to ensure that changes to social protection schemes adhere to the principle of "nothing about us without us", which is a core part of the global disability movement and underpins the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Ireland has committed to by ratifying.

I thank the committee for its attention. I will be happy to answer questions once we enter that part of the session.