Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

It would be easy to begin a speech like this with recrimination. People with disabilities and their families feel let down and betrayed by promises made and broken, hardships and stresses that have been ignored and by a commitment to rights abandoned. Those of us who know families that struggle with the consequences of disability know only too well the pain and frustration they feel.

I do not intend to recriminate. The motion before the House, in the drafting of which the Labour Party participated fully, is, as Deputy Stanton said, about making progress and not about scoring points. I begin, therefore, by urging the Government to consider carefully this motion which not alone has the support of the Opposition but also of a great many people within the disability movement. In a sense the motion represents a sacrifice for them too because instead of insisting on rights now, it points the way towards the progressive realisation of rights. It demonstrates how a consensus might be developed around a strategy for dealing, once and for all, with an area of neglect and disadvantage that has been a blight on public policy throughout the years of our economic growth and prosperity.

Last year was the European Year of People with Disabilities. The year commenced with a protest and ended with a summit. The protest was a solemn occasion when a large number of families from all around the country came to the launch of the European Year of People with Disabilities at the Mansion House to express their fears for the future. Many of us met those parents, as we have done time and again. The questions have not changed. "What happens to my child when I die?" "How do I cope with my child when he or she still needs to be helped to do many of the things others take for granted and I am crippled with arthritis or otherwise unable to do the things I used to do?" "How, when I am elderly, do I cope with the shouting, the suffering, the violence, the incontinence, the emotional distress that my child's disability causes?" "How do I make policy makers understand that my child will need help and support through the many years of my ageing?"

Throughout last year some of those questions seemed to fade into the background as some of the other achievements took over. There was the highlight of the year, the Special Olympics World Summer Games, and the groundswell of public and community support it engendered. The games in many ways reflected a view throughout Ireland that people with intellectual disabilities are an integral and respected part of our community, citizens of real achievement. In the aftermath of the games additional money was provided for much-needed services. Throughout the year there was a form of dialogue on the development of a long-promised and keenly-awaited disability Bill.

At different times in that dialogue it seemed that real progress was going to be made. For instance, following a meeting with the Disability Legislation Consultative Group on 15 July last year, the Taoiseach was reported in the following day's newspapers as saying he was committed to rights-based legislation. A spokesperson for the Taoiseach said he favoured the greater access to courts to enforce rights upheld by the Bill's appeals mechanism. However, as the year went on the language began to change. The year ended with a summit organised by the National Disability Authority in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. The summit was opened by the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy O'Dea, and closed by the Taoiseach, both of whom made long speeches and managed to avoid mentioning the previous explicit commitment to rights-based legislation. By the end of the European year the term "rights" had disappeared entirely from the Government lexicon and had been replaced by phrases such as "positive action measures" and "cross-cutting policies".

Throughout the European Year of People with Disabilities, waiting lists for essential services across all forms of disability remained almost stagnant. There is no need for me to repeat the figures here. What must be stressed again and again is that despite the huge level of community support for people with disabilities, they continue to be neglected at every level of public policy. The hallmarks of public policy have been insufficient resources, no strategic thinking, no planning and no political commitment to rights. Government Ministers, when they speak of the issue of disability, now refer to an annual investment of a €1 billion. From where did this figure come and how is it made up? Is the Government lumping together direct income payments, tax allowances, capital investment in access to public buildings and so on to make up a figure that looks far larger than it actually is? The truth is that no service-providing agency in Ireland in any area of disability service is able to plan for the future. Every service-providing agency is dealing with emergencies and only emergencies. None have been able to offer new places in residential care, training, education or sheltered or other forms of employment.

There are so many different forms of disability that affect life in so many ways and the response of Government and the community must be multifaceted. That was the reason for the establishment of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities — the majority of the members of which had a disability — under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Flood, the first time such a body had ever been established in Ireland.

As Members are aware, the commission made 402 recommendations, many of which have been implemented in one form or another in the intervening years. Its core recommendation, however, has been at the heart of the disability movement's struggle. It is noteworthy that members of the commission saw fit to come together last month to remind us that the commitment to rights-based legislation has still not been honoured. Why is that so? Why has it proven so difficult to make progress on this objective to which every party in this House is committed and which is explicitly promised in the programme for Government? The first answer is to be found in a quotation from Towards Equal Citizenship, a booklet published by the Government in early 2000 which reviewed the progress made in implementing the commission's recommendations. In terms of the legal entitlement to assessment and a statement of needs, it states:

The Department of Finance cannot accept these recommendations which imply the underpinning by law of access to and provision of services for people with disabilities as a right. This right, if given a statutory basis, would be prohibitively expensive for the Exchequer and could lead to requests from other persons seeking access to health and other services without regard to the eventual cost of providing these services.

Put simply, the Department of Finance, then and now, views people with disabilities as some sort of appalling vista. It believes any concept of rights for people with disabilities will bankrupt the State; any notion that a woman with a brain-injured husband should have an automatic right to our support is, apparently, a threat to our national security; and any idea that an adult with an intellectual disability should have our support to live as independently as possible is seditious. However, the people of Ireland hold a different view to that of the Department of Finance on such matters. None of that is true. The introduction of a comprehensive set of rights for people with disabilities would not bankrupt the State, it would challenge the system to respond appropriately and not before time.

It is because so much time has passed and because the system has failed to respond that the Labour Party, with the Green Party and Fine Gael, proposes the motion before the House tonight. We all know, though the Government will still not admit it, that no comprehensive set of rights will be enacted by this Government. For ideological and political reasons, it has decided to add it to the list of broken promises. That need not happen. The Opposition believes real progress will be made if the Government is prepared to sit down with people with disabilities, their advocates and families, and public bodies in this area and to treat them all as equal partners in the development of a comprehensive strategy. People with disabilities have long since come to the view that rights will not happen overnight.

The greatest insult they have been offered is the often-repeated assertion by Ministers that if they are granted rights, they will spend all their time running to the courts. Surely the time has come for all the points scoring, evasion and broken promises to stop. A proper, meaningful engagement, built around the twin concepts of progressive realisation of rights and an agreed strategy to put resources in place, is the best way forward. On behalf of the Labour Party I commend the motion to the House.

See this speech in context