Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Tá áthas orm deis a bheith agam labhairt ar an ábhar seo. I congratulate the Minister of State on the work she is doing, which is very challenging.

Approximately 14 or 15 years ago, I suggested that disability and that type of continuing care and support for people, which is not about curing an illness but about affording people with an ongoing condition a good quality of life, should be separated from acute medicine. It was my belief that when the argument came around the table regarding the money, the Minister for Health was in an invidious situation trying to argue on the one hand for acute medicine, which often gets a high profile in the media, and, on the other, for disability. I really welcome that 14 or 15 years later this decision has been taken and that the Minister of State has been put in the hot seat because she has the energy and commitment to make things happen. It is true that, not only in this country but all over the world, people were put in institutions. Thankfully that has changed and our attitude towards disability has moved forward. We still have a long way to go so we need to look forward to a change and an advocate.

It is important to have good structures but good structures without good Ministers do not, of their own accord, deliver anything. I do not believe in the idea that everybody is the same and that the service is the same no matter who is driving it. If I look around the world at everything from sport to medicine, politics or any other activity, people often make the difference, not the structures. Good structures help good people to make a difference. No matter how Ministries are divided up, there will be huge cross-cutting challenges. It is important that the Cabinet is collegiate and that it fights against the tendency of Departments that all of us who ever served in Government are aware of. At times they run the Departments as if they were fiefdoms in competition against each other, rather than one seamless part of a totality that is there with one aim in mind, namely the common good. One former Minister for Health stands out for me on disability and that was Brian Cowen. Things moved forward at that time but in the past ten years disability has not been high on the agenda and we need to change that.

I join with those who have raised the issues with section 39 funding. I cannot understand why sections 38 and 39 are different. That would be a quick win if the Minister of State could make sure that equal work gets equal wages. That is important for structures and it is important that equal bodies do equal work and get equal money to buy services. I mentioned the issue of accommodation to the Minister of State last night. In the past accommodation was simple. It was in congregated settings and it was provided by the HSE. In the past 20 years we have been decongregating the settings and that was a great thing and something I welcome. In doing that, we have not really decided how we will fund them. We have been using capital assistance scheme funding from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage that the various disability organisations realised they could tap into. However, this funding was never structured to deal with disability. For example, on the one hand an organisation might get the standard amount of CAS funding for a house and, on the other, it has to comply with HIQA standards for the buildings. HIQA standards are much higher than the standards any of us would apply to our private domestic dwellings. I will leave it to the Minister of State to crack this one but between the Departments of Health, Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and Housing, Local Government and Heritage, it is important that a dedicated and agreed process on accommodation in community settings is agreed. We need to make sure that houses as near as can be to the way the rest of us live are provided. The money should be in a ring-fenced fund and the specifications for that funding should match the requirement for the quality of the building because I have seen some fantastic examples of what can be done. There is one particular development in Galway city and some day the two of us will go and look at it if the Minister of State has not seen it already. Each apartment is individual and there are good community spaces. It is ideal because it caters for people who have significant disabilities on the one hand and it also provides for their individuality on the other. It does not have the appearance of a regimental system that does not allow for individual flair.

I only have 30 seconds left but I could talk on this subject for a long time because it is something I am hugely committed to and interested in. We need to move much more promptly on early intervention and therapies. Supporting therapies for people with disabilities are hard to get so we need to move on that. No matter what our political shade is, all of us in this House will say it is cruel and hard on parents, who might already have children with significant disabilities, that they spend so much of their lives advocating for basic rights and services. I have no doubt that if there is anybody in this House who might be able to tackle all that it is the Minister of State, and it is a huge workload. She can make headway in whatever time this Government lasts, and it is due to last three and a half years. I hope she will manage to make significant progress in laying the bedrock for a much brighter future for people with disabilities in that time.

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