Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Any legislation that does anything positive to enhance the rights of those with disabilities or to move them a little closer to some level of equality, which our society fails to give people with disabilities on many levels, has to be welcomed. The specific provisions of the part of this Bill that is actually written that are to be welcomed have been mentioned.

As has been mentioned, people with hearing disability will not be excluded from sitting on a jury purely because they require sign language. The Bill repeals the prohibition on a person of "unsound mind" standing for election to the Dáil. The National Disability Authority will become a monitoring authority, although, as has already been said, certain provisions need to be attached to that to really enhance the monitoring such that people with disabilities themselves, the people with the lived experience of disability, are key to the monitoring process, which is a critical aspect of the UN convention. Nonetheless there has been some progress.

The Bill introduces a standard regarding reasonable accommodation. The public sector quota for employing people with disabilities has now been extended to the Garda. The Bill gives the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission more responsibilities. All these things are good, but they are a long way short of what is needed to give full equality and rights to people with a disability. Critically, this is not the ratification that was promised.

The Bill suggests the thrust of it is about removing legislative barriers to the ratification of the UN convention. I am not an expert in this area; the experts are the people with the lived experience. Certainly those people, with whom I have been working to a considerable extent particularly in recent months, and those who advocate for them, reject the contention that the need to remove legislative barriers or the need to introduce legislation to make us compliant was a legitimate excuse for the ten years of indefensible delay in ratification. Somebody has to be telling the truth.

The solicitor and chief executive of the Centre for Independent Living, Gary Lee, recently wrote in The Irish Timesthat there is no legal impediment to the ratification of the UN convention. However, the Minister of State maintains, as successive governments have maintained, that there was and that this was the justification for the delay. I just do not buy it; Gary Lee does not buy it; and the people to whom I talk, who have the lived experience of disability, do not buy it.

I do not doubt the Minister of State's personal commitment on disability; he has a long record on it. However, I believe he is a prisoner of Fine Gael on this issue.

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