Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am really pleased to contribute on this Private Members' business this evening and I commend my comrade, Deputy Tully, on sticking with this important issue. I am speaking on behalf of my exhausted constituents across Kildare North who fight day in, day out for the services their children with disabilities need. They are hanging on by the proverbial thread like Aisling is for her son, Jack, and like Lourdes is for her son, Conor. These are mothers who have become advocates. The services they seek are the right of their children as citizens of this State but they are still only granted as if they were favours or wishes come true. This idea of services coming as favours is evident in the number of people who have contacted me about difficulties they have had with the services they are getting. I will not mention their names in this, their Dáil, tonight lest they be deemed troublemakers and their complaints held against them. If only the State was as diligent in its provision of services and assessments of need as it is in keeping lists of the number of times troublesome or annoying parents made contact, we would at least be going in the right direction. I know this because it happened to a constituent of mine in Kildare North. HSE staff could give her a blow-by-blow account of the number of times she had to make contact with them as if she had been doing it just for the fun of it rather than out of sheer desperation.

We are here because the High Court deemed the State to be breaking the law by acting outside the Disability Act with regard to AONs and rights guaranteed in law. Instead of acting on the High Court’s findings the other week and thereby abiding by the law, it emerged in a committee meeting that a HSE official had suggested that the State amend the law so it could not be sued by young children who were losing function and movement in their young bodies while the HSE ducked and dived from its duties, which is absolutely outrageous. Let us make something very clear: children with disabilities are every bit as equal to children without disabilities and they are just as much citizens of this State. They do not exist so that people without disabilities can feel better about themselves or feel that they are being good Samaritans in granting favours to them. They are citizens in their own right. We call on the Minister to implement the optional protocol and to guarantee that any review of the Disability Act will not be manipulated to undermine the current rights of people with disabilities. We need that.

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