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

As I said last night, any improvement in the rights of people with disabilities is welcome. A number of measures in the Bill are to be welcomed. I went through them so I will not repeat them. However, in many other respects, if I may put this as baldly as it deserves to be put, the Bill is an insult to people affected by disability.

People have waited unnecessarily for ten years because of the unwillingness of successive Governments, most recently those led by Fine Gael, to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities when there was no legal impediment to doing so. A red herring argument was put forward about the need to get the legislative ducks in a row to effect legislative equality across a range of areas as a prerequisite to ratification. I put it to the Minister of State that this is and remains a complete red herring, a con job and a ruse to avoid ratification, which was promised but which we are still not getting. We were supposed to get it by Christmas. This is a deliberate delaying tactic by Fine Gael. Tragically, the Minister of State, who has a record on this, is being used as the mudguard to continue these delaying tactics. In this respect, the Bill is an attempt at a cosmetic glossing over of the continued refusal of the Government to ratify and its delay in doing so. Fine Gael, probably as well as Fianna Fáil before it, has been worried about what it sees as the cost and political implications that would flow from ratification. Ratification would result in the relevant UN monitoring body standing over the Government, issuing reports year after year showing how successive Governments have failed and continue to fail people with disabilities, fail to vindicate their rights and fail to establish full legal and social equality for them. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind but that this is the case. When one considers what has happened to people with disabilities under the impact of austerity, many of the measures taken, far from improving the rights of people with disabilities, substantially worsened their situation.

The Government was well aware that it would have had serious problems implementing those austerity cuts if it had ratified the UN Convention because it would been called out on them and would have been many times over in serious breach of its commitments under the convention. One can see the list of attacks affecting people with disabilities in recent years: cuts to the motorised transport grants, to the mobility allowance, to medical card entitlements and to millions of hours in home help. Thankfully the attempt to cut personal assistance services failed but only because of the direct action protest by people with disabilities outside this House which forced the Government to row back on that. There have been other cuts across a range of services that have affected people with disabilities disproportionately, most obviously the cuts in housing and the lack of adapted social housing, as well as multiple cuts to the health service, public transport and social protection such as the exceptional needs payment, the fuel allowance and the Christmas bonus. In education there have been caps on special needs assistants, SNAs, and resource hours. There are cuts in the domiciliary care allowance and so on. This carries on now.

The mooted plans to take the staff out of DART stations affect people with disabilities. This affects the Minister of State's constituency. He should get on it. We will have a protest in a couple of weeks' time and we hope there will be protests up and down the DART line about this. It has very particular pertinence to disability rights and the question of access to public transport, the right to independent living and so on. Access to the DART is already inadequate. We had meetings in our area with the representatives of the DART on how to improve accessibility. The representative gave us commitments and promises to improve the situation. At the moment one has to give 24 hours' notice which severely limits people's freedom to travel especially if there are any hitches or delays. Critically, the ability of the DART service to respond to and improve that situation depends on having staff in the stations. Does the Minister of State know there is a plan to remove staff from DART stations? How the hell will they improve or even maintain access for people in wheelchairs if they remove staff? Sandycove-Glasthule and Grand Canal Dock are the first on the hit list. How will people phone the DART stations?

One of our suggestions to the DART representative was to have a direct line to the DART station or a text mechanism whereby the person could quickly, and at short notice, notify the DART stations that people with wheelchairs want to use them. That is not going to work if there are no staff in the DART stations, not to mind all the other health and safety issues or accidents. It will be bad for a range of people in terms of DART services but it will further degrade and deteriorate the access of people in wheelchairs and with other disabilities to DART stations. The Minister of State should start ringing the alarm bells that this will not be acceptable. There will be protests. I urge anybody who is on a DART line to start mobilising their community to ensure staff are not taken out of the DART stations as planned.

Several public service routes have been degraded in our area and all over the country. That will disproportionately hit the rights, freedoms, liberties and so on of people with disabilities. If we ratified the UN convention, we would be called out on such issues. Questions would be asked about that and a range of other things. That is why Fine Gael has not ratified it and does not want to ratify it. It is delaying it. I have been informed by a lady who is in the Public Gallery that the Government wants derogations on several areas in order that when it does ratify, it can slip out of some of its commitments because it does not want to do what is necessary in terms of resources and legislation to copperfasten the rights in the convention.

I smell a rat. The proof of this is to arrive with a half-written Bill. It is quite extraordinary. Some of the key areas that have been drawn to my attention include deprivation of liberty, the use of restraint in schools, involuntary sectioning and so on. We need a great deal of input on these and other issues from people with disabilities and those who advocate on their behalf. The point of the legislative process, when done properly in several stages, is precisely to have real buy-in from those affected. If that is true in general, it is all the more true when it comes to disability, and the convention specifies that people with the lived experience of disability must have a key role in the monitoring and preparation of the legislation. We are doing this the wrong way around, for cynical reasons. Where is the real consultation on the range of legislative areas that affect people with disabilities? It is all crammed into a little Committee Stage for last minute half-baked legislation that will be rammed through, instead of time being taken over that legislation with real buy-in, involvement, consultation and it being driven by people with disabilities. It should be done properly and the ratification should be happening now which would put pressure on the Government to get the legislation right and to be called out on it when it fails to vindicate the rights of people with disabilities and to establish the equality they deserve.

I am hearing frustration, anger, fury and justified cynicism about what is going on here. At best this is cosmetic at worst, a con trick being played on people to make it look as if we are doing something, because the truth is the Government was put under pressure before Christmas, and has been for many years, by disability advocacy groups demanding this ratification. There has been an indefensible ten year delay, yet still there are delaying tactics and this half-baked Bill. If the Minister of State were on the other side of the House, he would be saying what I am saying now. He knows what is going on. It has to be called. We need the ratification, not more excuses. The Government should just do it. Then let us prepare the legislation properly with the involvement and buy-in of, and indeed driven by, people with the lived experience of disability. Amendments will flow on Committee Stage but this is being done in the wrong way. We need ratification. The chorus of voices demanding that will increase when the inadequacy or cynicism of the way this legislation is being dealt with becomes more apparent over the coming weeks.

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