Paul Connaughton Snr (Galway East, Fine Gael)

I am delighted to get the opportunity to speak on this Bill. During an Adjournment debate at the time this Bill was introduced, I remember saying to my county colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Fahey, that there was a fundamental flaw in the last disability Bill. I was in the Mansion House before the last general election and unless one had just come out of a cave, one would have had to acknowledge the combined wisdom of hundreds of disabled people from all walks of life that that Bill was flawed. The Government was right to discard that Bill because it was an insult to the disabled. Time passed and it was expected that a new Bill would be introduced and, in due course, that happened.

I have been a Member of this House long enough to know that a great deal of legislation is based on prior knowledge of its importance to the area concerned. One would have thought that when this new Disability Bill was being drafted, fundamental flash points in the first Bill would not have been revisited. However, that was not the case.

Like previous speakers, I was delighted to hear on budget day that the Minister for Finance had made available sizable sums of money for the disabled sector. I, and everybody in the country, would certainly say it was long awaited, overdue and very welcome. However, this is a different matter. For a long time to come I will remember a meeting of the Irish Wheelchair Association in Tuam in my constituency to which I was invited a couple of weeks ago. This Bill was the matter for debate and various aspects of it were raised. A young fellow, who told me he was 23 years of age and confined to a wheelchair for life, had one question for me. He asked me how I would like to be confined to a wheelchair. That is a very difficult question to answer. I am so lucky I am not confined to a wheelchair. He said that for some strange reason, when it comes to what he needs for his lifestyle, he must compete with people who are better able to get their hands on the available financial resources. He said he would always be last, which is the case in that he has been waiting for two years for a new wheelchair. He has a wheelchair which one would think came from the last war. We must relate what that young fellow in the wheelchair in Tuam said a fortnight ago to what is proposed in this Bill.

There are many good measures in this Bill, and I would be the first to acknowledge that. However, it has two fundamental flaws about which many of the Government backbenchers are talking. The first flaw relates to the right to an assessment. Many of us believe that some people are able to pay for their own assessments, which they are doing, but thousands of families caring for disabled persons are not able to do so. This Bill does not give an absolute guarantee that a person who has Down's syndrome, is in a wheelchair or otherwise has the right to an assessment. Will this legislation mean that the needs of the person in the wheelchair will be met? The answer is "no". The reason is that it is written in stone in this legislation that it is subject to resources being available. When one has been at the bottom of the pile for one's entire life and the horizon is extremely low, one knows there is almost no hope unless there is legislation that ensures services will be provided. We in this country pride ourselves on having one of the better off economies in the world. It is no wonder the disabled community is up in arms. The Minister does not need to be into rocket science to know the basic reason they feel they have been sidelined again.

I happened to be in the RDS when this matter was debated. There was no difference between the atmosphere in the Mansion House three or four years ago and that in the RDS. By and large, it comes down to the question of what a right means. Having got the assessment, is a person entitled by law to the various services — medical, educational and recreational? Will such services be available to that person in future?

Why is it the Government cannot give an absolute undertaking? Is it that there are not enough trained psychologists and social workers? Is it afraid that if it allowed the legislation to go through, people would take it to court the next day because it was not able to deliver? If that is the problem, will the Government spell it out so that we know what it means? There must be some reason for its failure to give an absolute undertaking.

Ireland has got a great name throughout the world following the Special Olympics. The bonuses arising from it have been felt in every parish in my constituency and throughout the country. The disabled and those who look after them have gained a new confidence having seen what could be done in Dublin and Croke Park and every town and village during the Special Olympics. Most people fully understood it at that stage. If one were to ask any group of 100 able-bodied people in Dublin, Limerick or Cork or the smallest rural parish whether the disabled were entitled to an assessment by right and to the treatments recommended by that assessment, I have no doubt the response would be 95% positive. That is why I do not understand why the Government has decided to make the same mistake twice. It was bad enough to make the mistake once. One could argue that everybody gets it wrong on occasion but to get it wrong the second time is unacceptable. Is it that the Government has become arrogant having been in office for so long and expecting to be in office into the future?

What the Government is saying is that it will look after the well-off. Only last week the Fianna Fáil Party sought subscriptions of €4,500 from well wishers. One can rest assured that the people who will be involved with those contributions will not be too concerned about an assessment for the disabled or what will happen in their lives afterwards.

Following all the talk at Inchydoney and the great conversion to socialism at the time, how is it that inequality is coming through every line of the Bill? Surely the Government does not expect those involved in caring for the disabled, who fortunately are able to speak up and have avenues of communication, in an open modern democracy such as ours that prides itself on Christian principles to buy into this Bill without a murmur. They are 1,000% against it. Every person I have met during the past six months who has any involvement with wheelchair associations, school boards of management and so on is opposed to it. If that is what they say to me, I expect they say it to the Minister of State, Deputy Killeen, whose constituency is not very different from mine, and to his backbenchers. I have not heard a word from them.

At the end of the day the pressure will be great, but not from inside the House, because at the conclusion of the Second Stage debate, the Government will win the vote. That is how Parliament works. It would be too much to expect that some of the backbenchers on the Government side who have cried crocodile tears would be men and women enough to vote against it. They would not do that. Leaving that aside, public opinion will nail this Bill and I sincerely hope I will be around to see it happen. There are few issues that incense me as much as the one before the House.

It appears the Government's fundamental problem with the Bill is that it is afraid it will be unable to deliver the service and that if it is legal, people can resort to the courts. People have had to go to court already and have fared quite well. Under the appeals system, one appeals on a point of law to the High Court. Let us take, for example, a family where one member is in receipt of disability benefit of approximately €160 or €170 per week, another member cares for that person and is in receipt of approximately the same amount and no other income comes into the house. Can one imagine that family having to contemplate a trip to the High Court? They would not know where the High Court was. They would not be in a position to take a case. It is laughable that this is what that family would have to do if it thought it was not getting its rights under the provisions of this Bill.

People will say this Bill will cost a great deal of money and I have no doubt it will. The Exchequer has always been able to provide large sums of money for miscellaneous matters. The payments in respect of nursing home charges will cost a large amount of money. This will be found and there will not be a word about it. The tribunals, which may be curtailed a little, cost tens of millions of euro but serve an important purpose. Are these more or less important than a wheelchair-bound man in Tuam who is barely able to negotiate a proper floor not to mention an uneven surface? One such person waited two years for the Western Health Board to supply him with a wheelchair. Could that person be in a worse position in so far as this country is concerned?

The spin-doctors are having a bad time with this legislation because the people for whom it was intended have caught on to it. I notice the spinning has stopped now and the defence of this Bill is becoming more muted. I hope the Government will see the light of day and will return the Bill to the drawing board before the public turns on them. I have no idea how a matter such as this would fare in a general election. However, from discussions I have had with people with disabilities and with their carers, any Government which tries to push this legislation through will reap a very poor reward. The Government deserves to be severely penalised if it does that.

I refer to another related matter which was raised at the recent teachers' conferences. I have spent a lifetime advocating the importance of good resource and learning support teaching in schools. Great progress has been made by various Governments over the past ten years. Students with learning disabilities will soon discover a problem in schools in that pupils qualifying for resource teaching will be required to have a more serious learning disability than applied in the past. These are the more acute cases. I have no problem with this but other children with a learning disability will be moved on to the resource teacher. Because resource teachers are being shared between a number of schools, the number of children requiring that support is increasing but the pupil-teacher ratio has not been changed. A child will be given two or three hours teaching by a learning support teacher and then will be dropped back into the ordinary classroom which might have 25 to 35 children, depending on the location. The child has no chance in the world.

I have said many times in this House that there is no greater gift to be given to children at that age than to present them with the opportunity of catching up with their classmates. When the time comes for them to go out into the big, bad world, they will be able to fend for themselves. There is no greater gift for any child; it is better than winning all the lottos. I know of many cases where people were given the right support at the right time and the outcome was nothing short of a miracle.

I ask the House to consider those who are not given such an opportunity. They are confined to a darkness and they will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. This Bill should be an opportunity for all those people to have the best possible chance in life. I do not envisage that some of these young people aspire to be pilots, scientists or chemists. If they are given professional support in good time they will be able to live independent lives and make their way in life. If we achieve this for just one child who would not normally get it, it is a good day's work in this Parliament.

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