Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Last year, as Ireland clocked up ten years without ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a series of protests took place outside the gates of Dáil Éireann. Hundreds of people participated in these protests. Before coming into the Chamber this evening, I spoke to one of them, a young person aged 21 who participated in several of those protests. This person said the young generation will not wait for its rights, that there is a mood for change and that it is not they who are disabled, but rather the system that is disabling them. That is very well put and is clearly shown by this motion and in this debate.

The fact that the budget for disability services was reduced by €159.4 million, or 9.4%, between the years 2008-15 is a stark illustration of that. We saw cuts to the mobility allowance, cuts to the motorised transport grant, cuts to the personal assistant scheme, cuts to therapy services, cuts to home support services, cuts to community services and more. We see that in the census of 2016, unemployment among people with disabilities and chronic illnesses stood at 26.3%, more than double the rate for the population as a whole, which stood at 12.9%. The Government still refuses people going back to work in those circumstances automatic access to a medical card. My colleague, Deputy Boyd Barrett, asked me to raise on the floor of the Dáil tonight that he met with representatives of Spinal Injuries Ireland yesterday, who asked us to give voice to their demand for automatic medical card entitlement for those with spinal injuries, and I am happy to echo that.

I mentioned the protest that took place outside the Parliament. This is part of an international trend. Some 45,000 people with disabilities participated in the women's protest called in the US at the time of the inauguration of Donald Trump. They were reviving a tradition of campaigning and protest that goes back in the US to the 1970s when the emergence of the modern disability rights movements was seen, inspired by the black civil rights movement, driven forward by returning veterans from Vietnam and then rippling across the world. These protests and this mood show that among people with disabilities of all ages the feeling is that enough is enough, that they will no longer tolerate second-class citizenship and that they are not second-class citizens, in particular, perhaps, among a younger generation that despises the gap between the official rhetoric and the reality, the gap between the rhetoric of a republic of opportunity on the one hand and the blatant, systematic discrimination they face in their day-to-day lives on the other. They are supported by other young people from outside that community who are prepared to fight against all injustice and oppression. As people engage in campaigns of this kind they can and, I hope, will draw political conclusions, as others who have campaigned for disability rights in the past have done. I refer to people such as Stephen Hawking, who has been mentioned in this debate. Stephen Hawking was obviously a world-famous cosmologist and was well known for having a particularly difficult form of motor neurone disease, but he was also a campaigner against the Tory Government and its policies of privatisation. He said he would not be alive if it were not for the National Health Service. I refer to people such as Helen Keller, who was perhaps the foremost champion of the cause of people with disabilities internationally in the 20th century. In a university question-and-answer session in which she participated, the following exchange took place which shows some of the political conclusions she drew from campaigning for people with disabilities. I will end on this exchange.

Q. Which is the greatest affliction, deafness, dumbness, blindness?

A. None.

Q. What then is the greatest human affliction?

A. Boneheadedness.

Q. Do you think the voice of the people is heard at the polls?

A. No, I think money talks so loud that the voice of the people is drowned.

Q. What do you think of capitalism?

A. I think it has outlived its usefulness.

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