Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in. I apologise; as the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, is before another committee, I will have to leave after their responses to attend it.

I was on the DSG and benefited from Ms Dempsey-Clifford's stewardship and her skills as a chair, so I appreciate that very much.

As for the NDA's reports, I have a number of young adults and teenagers. My youngest fella has gone into transition year, and if he got a report like either of those reports at end of term, I would be annoyed with him, to say the least. He would get a few sharp words from me about a complete lack of application and lack of engagement. They are quite poor reports. When the constraints under which the NDA operates and the diplomacy with which it has to engage is considered, it is striking that both the reports corroborate each other. A number of terms are used, such as a lack of willingness and the sense that people are dragging their heels, taking steps backward.

We are in absolute crisis. The Government has a PR campaign at the moment called "Disability rights are human rights". I came back to Dublin at the end of August and saw it on a bus shelter and I had to stop and check myself. This is the Government that sent an instruction from Cabinet to kill my disability Bill just before the summer recess. This is a Government that says one thing but does another. "Disability rights are human rights." Luckily, because of the generosity of my colleagues in the Seanad and the Government parties, we actually managed to get that legislation to its next Stage, and I will return to that.

We have a crisis with children who have experienced chronic delays in accessing scoliosis surgery in Temple Street Hospital. Their operations are delayed to such an extent that they go into crisis and then the surgery becomes very complex and has life-limiting and life-altering outcomes. We have learned that it has led to the death of one child. That is Ireland in 2023. My own son had such an experience in Temple Street. If I did that to a cat or a dog, or cattle, an inspector from the Dublin Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, DSPCA, would come to my premises and take that animal away from me. We are doing that to children with disabilities in this country, and it is not an event. This is a slow-moving, foreseeable outcome of inaction. It is not for lack of resources. We have plenty of money. It is for a lack of will. That is something to which the NDA alluded in its reports.

I think of people like Geraldine Lavelle, who suffered a spinal cord injury, a beautiful young 29-year-old woman in Sligo who cannot live independently. She is in a nursing home, even though she has a fully adapted and accessible home near her parents in Sligo. She cannot live there because the HSE will not administer - I will not say "cannot" - a care package for her. I think of people like Daniel Airey in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, a beautiful young man who wants to live an independent life. He cannot because the HSE will not administer - not cannot - a care package for him. We have children lactating due to inappropriate prescription of medicines because they had doctors who did not have higher specialist training.

The NDA's reports are negative. My assessment of the situation in Ireland with regard to disabilities and anybody who is vulnerable is that it is an appalling vista, and in our lived experience it is deteriorating. Mr. Paul Reid, before this committee as CEO of the HSE last year, admitted that the progressing disability services in the community programme was a complete failure. There is no accountability. We do not know what clinical sign-off there was on it. I can tell the committee, there was none. There was no impact study done, there was no risk assessment, and thousands of children are suffering. The HSE cannot even do the assessments, never mind provide the supports and the therapies.

With the same intellectual honesty we had for the financial crash, where we handed over affairs to our European partners, I think we are at that point when it comes to disabilities. What would be routinely possible throughout the European Union and even in the United States, in Trump's America, with the Americans with Disabilities Act, where they can provide care packages, we cannot.

It is not that we cannot; it is just that they will not.

In terms of accountability, Deputy Ellis asked whether full ratification of the protocol of the UNCRPD, which is contained within the programme of Government, would assist us in persuading the agencies of this State, so the Department of Health, the HSE or whomever, to do their job. CHO 6 in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown has one of the largest populations in the State. I was in the office of the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Rabbitte, and learned that that CHO only has around 20 care packages in operation. What does that say? Such a situation is beyond comprehension. It is a brutal situation. We have thousands of young people inappropriately housed in nursing homes for want of proper accommodation and care packages so we have to shout from the rooftops.

I know that Dr. Tamming is constrained to a certain extent in how vocal she can be but Senator Flynn was right. This is the mother and baby homes scandal of our time but this time we know about it. Therapy and treatment delayed for children within the therapeutic window, and within their little chance at life, is a life denied. We are doing that to many thousands of families. I would argue that we need to ratify the protocol fully. When my colleagues on this committee go to their parliamentary party meetings, I ask them to please impress upon their leadership to do this and take action. I ask that because the likely life cycle of this Government means that must happen soon, either in this winter term or spring term or else it is not going to happen, and this is the only thing that will hold people's feet to the fire. For what it is worth, I will continue to push my Disability (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2023 and I have other legislation to bring forward. The only way to get an answer to this issue is to compel people to do it.

When HIQA appeared before this committee, there was talk about its time to move on policy and decongregating from these settings. I think they stated that 5,000 people had been decongregated since 2015. I asked the HIQA representatives where those people went and was told the authority did not monitor that. I know from the volume of correspondence that I receive every day that thousands of these people went home to elderly parents and go into crisis. The stock response from the HSE is that it will not intervene unless one of the elderly parents has died and the other is terminally ill or in crisis. Hundreds of decongregated people are homeless because we know that a disproportionately high number of disabled citizens are homeless.

Dr. Tamming has said that the National Disability Authority carried out a study on how people fared. HIQA told me at this committee that it does not know where these people have gone. Has Dr. Tamming an idea as to where the proportion of people who have been decongregated have gone? I have been told that it will be 18 or 19 years before my son will succeed in getting a housing unit, so I will be over 80 years of age if I am still alive. Given the housing and homeless crises, does Dr. Tamming have a sense of where these 1,600 people in congregated settings might realistically go?