Ms Fiona Weldon:

Independent Living Movement Ireland is a national cross-impairment disabled persons organisation, or DPO for short. Our vision is an Ireland where disabled people have the same rights as everybody else does. We believe strongly in inclusive societies where everyone can achieve more.

We recently launched our new ambitious strategic plan, which is led by our strategic values of human rights, collective empowerment and social justice. These core values reflect the philosophy of independent living as defined by the disabled people's movement and our ambitions for genuine inclusion where everyone lives to their full potential. They underpin our activities in pursuit of our mission.

Human Rights are very important to ILMI, as well as collective empowerment and social justice. Social justice is about making rights real for people and achieving a more equal distribution of resources. It involves dismantling structural ableism and embedding the social model of disability in policy thinking, policy-making, and policy implementation.

In our opening statement we want to focus on how disabled people are supported to organise in our own collective spaces so that we can be given the time to analyse how our communities should be and how the State needs to resource and support our collective spaces, which are DPOs

Planning for inclusive communities must from the outset be led and guided by the UNCRPD. Before even beginning to think about how we plan for these, or how we might design or build homes, we must embed the concept that disabled people, through their DPOs, are actively involved in the co-creation of strategic policies and practices that impact our lives. The realisation of disabled people's rights under the UNCRPD in resourcing inclusive communities must be grounded on the principle that as disabled people, we are the experts in our own lives. In realising the UNCRPD we need to move away from passively being asked to participate in consultations when policy has already been decided, and move towards resourcing disabled people to work together to drive the development of policy, practice and systems that will lead to our active involvement in our communities as equals.

Due to the historic lack of investment in community development approaches with disabled people to develop collective autonomous spaces in DPOs, policy discussions in relation to disability in Ireland have either happened through disability service providers speaking on our behalf or through individual disabled activists seeking change for themselves. Neither of these provides long-lasting results in making inclusive communities real. However, with the emergence of ILMI and other DPOs the process has thankfully begun to change and we welcome the chance to inform the committee’s thinking on the need for investing and resourcing the sustainability of local DPOs to inform local planning for inclusive communities.

The role of DPOs in realising inclusive communities is crucial. From the ILMI's perspective, planning for inclusive communities can only be effectively done when we as disabled people are actively involved in designing what our local communities should look like so we are able to participate as equals. Two fundamental changes are needed to achieve this. It is about shifting the thinking as to how the State engages with us. We need to move from consultation to co-creation. We also need to move from engaging with disabled people individually to structured engagement with us collectively through DPOs.

DPOs are disabled people's organisations and are very unlike disability services providers. They are led by and for disabled people. DPOs work on a cross-impairment basis with disabled young people and adults. DPOs are about bringing disabled people together to bring about a more inclusive, equal society through community development approaches. DPOs are social inclusion and collective spaces for disabled people, informed through an equality, human rights and social model of disability lens. DPOs must be the voice of disabled people. Disabled people working together in DPOs is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland. DPOs are not just social spaces where disabled people meet online or, thankfully now, in person. They are spaces where we as disabled people are empowered collectively to critically analyse the social exclusion and oppression we face through a social equality and human rights framework.