Mr. Gary Kearney:

I thank the committee members, some of whom will know me. I was here ten years ago when I was five years out from becoming disabled. I am 15 years old as a disabled person and I spent 45 years of my life as an able person, so I know what I have lost. I know the difference between being able and being disabled - the financial cost, the social cost, all of it. That is added to the fact that I am invisible, although I am wearing purple so you can all see me. I am a second-class disabled person because I was not born disabled. You would not believe it. This is what I faced all of the way through the first eight years of my life as a person with disabilities.

If it was not for Headway, Dr. Elaine Kelly, who is my neuropsychologist, and my support services, I would not be here. For starters, they understood the mental trauma that you go through when you acquire disability later in life. I have two lives - I have up to 45 and I have now. As part of my recovery, we found that I needed something to fight for. I needed something to stand behind; I needed to believe. What had happened to me made me so angry, and that is what I went after. I fought for my rights - the human and civil rights that I had lost. I fought to get them back and not just for me, because I can actually survive quite okay in this world, but for everybody who is denied them. That is what I have been doing.

I am a practical person. I see something and I go to fix it. I was working with Irish Rail. I saw something so I said something, and we now have Changing Places. When I nearly got hit in the head by a bus mirror, I contacted Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann, and we now have yellow bus mirrors. These are simple little things but they are so important.

A few weeks ago, I was in a Leinster House dining room - perhaps the Ceann Comhairle's dining room or the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's - for the Getting Nowhere campaign that was launched by the Irish Wheelchair Association. It was the members, the clients and the wheelchair users who were there and they told of the problems. Last week, they raised access issues in the public realm through pictures and words written and organised by every single one of us who is disabled. These are very practical, simple things.

Then there is the technical side of it, for example, when we sign off to implement the CRPD. By the way, there is a way that we do things in this country. Some people would sign it and then implement it a year or two years later.

We do not do that. We wait ten to 12 years before we sign off on it. In this time, the Civil Service is supposed to have put all the regulations and laws in place to allow us to implement this convention as quickly as possible. Instead, we have gone backwards. The UNCRPD is very simple. We start at Article 5 and work on through to Article 30 and it will all fall into place. We, however, have gone backwards. The Department got out of this area, sort of. I refer to the funding provided to disability groups, to support services and to anybody looking for support. Our men's shed got cut off because we were not doing something new in Headway. Who do we have to go to see for it? It is the HSE. This means this matter is still within the remit of the Department of Health, which is against the social model of disability.

This is where my civil rights have gone. This is why I get angry and why I fight. I could not do it without Headway and without the support groups like the IWA and the DFI, because I rely on their expertise and we all work together. This is the other thing. If we keep siloing ourselves into smaller and smaller groups, then we lose the strength we have. This strength is that we are the biggest minority in this country. Instead of fighting about silly things, we need to all pull together and get what we deserve: our civil and human rights and to be treated like people first. Until we do that, we can be talking about 4.2, 3.7, or whatever, but we will still walk outside into the car park and find the markings are wrong for disabled parking spaces or we will walk outside the front gate and the tactile paving and other things will be wrong. People are being let do this because the UNCRPD is not being implemented and we are not being listened to. Two of the speakers mentioned the NTA, which is the biggest nightmare of our lives. We can see heads nodding everywhere here. This is the case because you are not listening to us, all of us, and you have to do that.

I am sorry if I get a bit emotional but that is the way I am. It goes with the brain injuries and the ADHD. I am talking about simple, practical things. All you have to do is ask Dr. Sinnott, me or any or all of us. We have this lived experience and this knowledge. Most people, I firmly believe, are not ableist. They just do not understand Article 8 of the UNCRPD concerning awareness. Hence the purple and the purple plinth. If a purple bus is seen going up and down the road saying "UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities", yes, that will be me. I turn things purple to make people aware, because awareness is the foundation of what we are doing. This is why I do what looks simple. Without this awareness, however, we are not going to get anywhere else. We can teach people. Sadly, eco-ableism exists. I could not believe it, but it is real. Now, I have found a new one, namely, ego-ableism. I thought of this one myself. I am proud of this. Ego-ableism is when an able-bodied person thinks they know more about disabilities than a disabled person. I will finish on this point. I thank the committee.