Mr. Peter Kearns:

Senator Clonan touched on something with regard to disabled people. I agree that when they are asked, a very small percentage are concerned about assisted suicide. Our work with the DPOs and with disabled people only reaches a tiny percentage of disabled people. When we reach them and do a workshop on the social model, we separate those who have permanent disabilities which change one's whole life. These people say that they have permanent disabilities and that they will not be cured. There is no cure if the disability is permanent; they see this. One might say that I have cerebral palsy which is a major disability. We might view disabled people in a certain way, but I am saying that this is my life and my body. We want to move away from the medical model or the cure and towards the social model and living a barrier-free life. The sad thing is that most disabled people do not have that opportunity.

We definitely have a view on how the State is interacting with the UN convention. I worked on the UN convention years ago. I was embarrassed that Ireland was so far way behind African and Asian countries. The UN convention must be fully resourced to give confidence to disabled people in moving beyond their impairment to looking to fix the barriers for disabled people. At the moment that is a very small percentage of the population.