Lisa Chambers (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I am working with a girl with whom I went to school who had a very bad cycling accident when she was 27 and is now quadriplegic. Her story is in the public domain. She has given interviews to several papers. She has been waiting four years to get a care package but it has not come through. She is from Mayo. She lives in a congregated setting in Sligo and cannot get out of it. I am working with Mayo and Sligo county councils on the matter and public representatives from across the political divide are trying to resolve it. We have been interacting with the different services for probably two and a half years. The HSE has been abysmal in dealing with this. Ms McCarthy said that when one person no longer needs the hours, they are divvied up between five or six people. I gather Geraldine – I do not think she will mind me giving her name as it has already been made public - is on a waiting list indefinitely until somebody no longer needs a care package and she gets to use it. That is the kind of response I get. The local authorities said they could not get housing for her until the care package was in place. It is a chicken-and-egg situation.

I have met both local authorities, as have Geraldine and her team, but we are no further along. We have a ream of paper but no solution. I have done searches on daft.ie, as have Geraldine and others, for properties to purchase in order to see what is being built. There are two projects that have come through the planning process but it will be two years before they will be turnkey ready. They are quite far out of the town so they are accessible but not inclusive. How is she to live if she cannot get from her home to her place of work? Thankfully, other factors are working out better than the accommodation. Have the witnesses any suggestions on how to deal with the housing issue or what has their experience been? What do we need to do to get a budget to deal with this? I feel the local authorities would like to do more but one commented that they do not want to be competing in the private market and purchasing properties because they will then drive up the price for other buyers at a time when there is very little housing. That does not help the person looking for the home. I do not know where we will go from here. We are still going back and forth.

Do the witnesses have any suggestions about the care package? Is it simply a case that there are not enough to go around? The personal assistant service is the same. I could not agree more with the witness. People are not being given the choice between the service, home help hours or care packages. They are being told they are getting X number of hours in a particular context and that is it. They might say they would like fewer home help hours and more personal assistant hours because they want to get out and have a coffee or to go to a play or something. The choice does not seem to be there.

Have the witnesses seen what other countries have done in their budgetary processes to proof disability inequality? What are their top two suggestions for what we could implement as disability proofing in budget 2019?