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

Does the Taoiseach have a special adviser on disability matters, or have any of the Taoiseach's special advisers ever suggested he heeds the call of disability organisations and advocate groups for his Department to co-ordinate implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, and disability matters generally? There are people dealing with different aspects of disability across a whole series of departmental silos, and as a result we do not have a rights-based approach to disability matters in the context of the UNCRPD. For example, I met a woman recently who spoke about her son who has Down's syndrome and who is constantly having his medical card entitlement reviewed. In our own area at the moment there is a door-to-door transport service called Accessible Community Transport Southside, ACTS, for people who are wheelchair users and those with mobility issues. The service's lack of funding means several thousand people with mobility issues or who use wheelchairs and cannot use public transport are going to lose the service through the lack of a relatively small amount of money. I could go on. The problem is that all these things are dealt with by subsidiaries of departmental silos rather than having a co-ordinated approach, which the Taoiseach's Department should lead, towards ensuring a rights-based approach to disability matters in line with the implementation of UNCRPD.

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