Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Ellis. I welcome this Private Members' motion and commend those who tabled it. I also welcome the representatives from the Independent Living Movement Ireland to the Visitors' Gallery, especially Shelly, James and Damien, whom I know personally.

The Oireachtas disability group, of which I am the vice chair, has been enhanced by the coming on board of the Independent Living Movement Ireland in recent months. I very much welcome its participation. In December of last year, a comprehensive guide to the legal rights of people with disabilities was launched by the Independent Living Movement Ireland in co-operation with the free legal aid centres. The guide was authored by Anna O'Duffy. Initiatives such as this have helped inform the debate on independent living, what it is and what is required. We are talking about the right of people living with a disability to live independently. It also helped frame all of this in the language of rights and, disappointingly, in terms of rights still denied.

I commend, in particular, the focus of tonight's motion on differentiating between home help and home care provision and personal assistance provision. The ability to independently control and organise one's life is essential to restoring dignity and hope to those living with a disability. I am worried, however, that the Government simply does not understand this important distinction or worse still, does not place appropriate value on it. The decision in July to stop the rehabilitative training allowance, RTA, showed what little value the Government places on such payments, given the meagre saving to the Exchequer that came with its scrapping. How are we to have any confidence that the Government values and will protect the right of those with a disability to live independently, if months later the RTA has still not been restored and we have no details on the training and other opportunities that were meant to take its place?

We also need to remind the Government this evening that the modest demands contained in this motion are not new. They do not represent a new ask or asks of the Government and this motion should not come as a surprise. On foot of the signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, in March of last year and with the associated optional protocol still to be ratified, some of us knew that this act of empowerment would require resourcing, primarily through personal budgets and the employment of personal assistants directly by disabled people to allow them to carry out tasks that their disabilities will not allow them to do independently. It is an indictment of the way the Government goes about its business that it deals with disability issues in a less than thoughtful way. Opposition voices are required to submit endless parliamentary questions and table, as has happened tonight, substantial Private Members' motions in an effort to secure provisions that should have come into effect once the main announcement was made, or shortly afterwards.

When the Minister of State responds to this debate, therefore, I ask him to approach this subject from the point of view of rights. He spoke about equality earlier, and this absolutely is about that, but it is also a matter of rights. That is how equality is upheld. This summer, I tabled a parliamentary question asking for figures on those waiting on a personal assistance service and the cost associated with providing an additional 500,000 extra hours. I was surprised to read in the response that "The need for increased services is acknowledged and the HSE continues to work with agencies to explore various ways of responding to this need in line with the budget available".

This type of language is totally incompatible with the change in attitude required when addressing the rights of people with disabilities, and which was promised in March of last year. Also, in December of last year, I hosted an information session in the Oireachtas audiovisual room. Mr. James Cawley and Ms Shelly Gaynor of the Independent Living Movement Ireland made a presentation outlining how personal assistance services have transformed the lives of those who have received them. At the weekend, in Derry, I addressed our party's Ard-Fheis and impressed upon the delegates the need to be ever vigilant, mindful that Government promises and even declared policy regarding people with disabilities, while featuring in headline Government announcements, do not always receive the required resourcing in the expected time that follows. For example, nearly two years after legal effect was given to the official recognition of Irish Sign Language, we still have not seen the required resourcing for its full and anticipated promotion and development.

We need to see rights made real. For this to happen, however, provision and resourcing must go hand in hand with announcements held to great fanfare. Sinn Féin is acutely aware of this and, in preparing for the opportunity to make rights real, in our alternative budget for 2019 we provisioned an additional allocation of 500,000 personal assistant hours. Building on that, in our 2020 alternative budget we allocated an additional 1.5 million personal assistant hours and we demonstrated how that, and everything else contained in that document, could be funded. It can be done; all it requires is the political will. With all due respect to the Minister of State, he and his Government have the power to make rights real for people with disabilities. Despite all his earlier claims, when is he going to step up to the plate? Is he going to champion this cause? Is he that man at the Cabinet table? He has very little time left to demonstrate that he does intend to make his mark, as the general election is fast approaching.

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