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

Many if not most organisations advocating for people with disabilities were extremely disappointed with the budget. One of the demands they all rallied behind was that there should be a cost-of-disability premium to bring minimum payments for people with disabilities up to €350 per week, as we deemed appropriate during Covid, and that people with disability should get at least that in recognition of the huge costs of living with disability. I was at a briefing with Inclusion Ireland where some shocking facts were relayed on our lack of provision for people with disabilities. I was informed that 2,500 people are unnecessarily living in institutions and that 1,300 people below the age of 65 are living in nursing homes. I was also informed that many young people are still living with parents who are their carers. However for 1,500 of those people, their carers are over the age of 70 and for 400 of them their carers are over the age of 80, begging the question of who will care for these people when their parents pass on. I will name a few of the issues as follows. There is also a lack of therapeutic resources and supports in schools for young people with special needs. The Government has failed to seriously address all these things and to ratify the optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Equality is a right for people with disabilities but the Government has not matched that with budgetary measures or with policy measures generally.

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