Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Following on with decongregation, we had HIQA before the committee the year before last. In their time to move on the process of decongregation they said that they had decongregated between 5,000 and 10,000 disabled citizens. When I asked HIQA where they went, I was told that they do not map that. I can tell the witnesses that a lot of them go into crisis. They return to elderly parents as adults with disabilities. For example, one lady who is 88 wrote to me. Her husband is 92 and uses a walker. Their 54-year-old daughter was returned to them from a congregated setting. She arrived by taxi. She is a wheelchair user. The 88-year-old lady is a cancer survivor and has been asked not to lift. The HSE is refusing to provide them with any supports until - the HSE has said this - one of them has passed away. It might be worth looking at this before a person is decongregated to make sure there is somewhere safe and accessible for them to go. If there is not, does the National Disability Authority have a view on whether decongregation is appropriate in those circumstances?

I will turn to the national human rights strategy for disabled people and the NDA's role in providing policy advice to the Government. As a member of the Joint Committee on Defence and National Security, I am conscious there is an acknowledgement that Ireland is Europe's weakest link in terms of security, defence, intelligence and so on. There is an intellectual honesty in accepting that Ireland is on the floor in European terms and that we are dysfunctional in that regard. In drafting a national strategy of human rights, what is the NDA's level of ambition? What is our baseline in European terms for disabled citizens when the witnesses are talking to our counterparts in Europe? Are we in the top 10% of European countries for optimal outcomes or are we, as I suspect, worst in class in Europe? Are we outliers in European terms? Some of the measures were mentioned already, for example being worst in the OECD for participation in paid employment and so on. I would suggest that we are also worst in homelessness, social isolation and suboptimal medical and social outcomes. I am curious to know where the witnesses think we are and what is our base level.

The authority is carrying out a review on the CDNTs, as commissioned by the HSE. Who designed the CDNTs? Will the witnesses tell the committee who was responsible for it? Who were the people who designed the CDNTs? Was there clinical sign-off on the CDNTs? Did any clinician sign off on them? Was a risk assessment carried out of the transition to the progressing disability services, PDS, programme? Untold harm has been done to tens of thousands of Irish children as a consequence of PDS. It has been an unmitigated disaster. It was interesting that the aim of it was to provide disability supports in "an equitable and consistent manner". I can tell the witnesses, as a member of a family who accessed those supports, that pre-2009 and pre-PDS some people got a really poor service but post-PDS and with the CDNT model nobody gets a good service. Nobody gets a service whatsoever. I suppose this is equitable and consistent across the country but it is hardly a desirable outcome. I would like to know about the risk assessments.

I see that the NDA is hosting a conference in October on the sexual and reproductive rights of disabled people. I am curious to know about that. It has been widely publicised, as we established last week at the health committee, that a large number of disabled teenagers have become infertile through the lack of routine intervention on the urological surgical wait list at Children's Health Ireland, CHI, and that this is systemic. So it is a de facto form of forced sterilisation. Do the witnesses have a view on that and on whether the NDA might invite experts in that area to speak at its conference? I imagine that Ireland is probably the only country in Europe that sterilises disabled people through force majeure, which is to say a lack of routine interventions that allow for the development of testicular cancer, ovarian cancer, bowel and bladder cancers, and incontinence.