Michael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Dáil Éireann shall take note of the Report of the Joint Committee on Disability Matters entitled "Ensuring independent living and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities", on 10th March, 2022.

I thank the members of the Joint Committee on Disability Matters for the major work and effort put into the report and into our deliberations over the past two years. Our members are extremely dedicated and committed to the challenges we face. Our committee is about disability matters and we are challenged to make the lives of people with disabilities better for them, their families and their communities.

Each week, we have public meetings. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the report, I must inform the House that we have heard harrowing stories from people with disabilities and their families and carers over the past two years. Sometimes on the Thursday morning you would be completely exasperated by challenges that families, communities and individuals meet every day because of their disabilities. We listen to that, and the group of people on the committee I am lucky to chair have huge empathy and a huge work rate in advancing the cases for people with disabilities and making their lives better.

The team supporting the committee has done a massive amount of work on pulling together all the information we received. We started out with the now international phrase "Nothing about us without us", and we looked at going out to people with disabilities and looking for the lived experience. Somebody said at a committee meeting recently that it is not the lived experience but the living experience and people living on a daily basis with disabilities. I thank the team who bring the information to us daily and support us in a way that can only be commended. We are lucky to have them.

Today we are looking at the report entitled Ensuring Independent Living and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. When we were going through that process, we had various stakeholders in. The challenges faced and the issues of people with disabilities not being seen as full people in society cannot be overemphasised. We cannot overemphasise the frustration they feel every day. In their communities and families, those frustrations are met every day.

We came with the report, which was laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. The challenges we look at concerned the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, a landmark convention. It is a fantastic document but means nothing to society or to people with disabilities unless it is implemented. The United Nations has put a huge amount of work into it. Deputy Cairns joined me on a visit to the United Nations earlier this year. There was a huge amount of talk about what needs to be done. Let us be real about it. While we can talk about the UNCRPD and the implementation thereof, it is a worthless document unless states, including this State, stand up to meet the challenges head-on.

This morning at the disability matters committee there was frustration among members about the ratification of the optional protocol. A key cornerstone for us is to have that protocol implemented. While the UNCRPD is implemented, the optional protocol is going through Departments. We get advice from different people in front of us but we do not see why there should be any delay in the ratification of the protocol. A key thing we need to do is to ensure it is ratified.

We seek to ensure people with disabilities can enjoy the same human rights as everybody else by integrating people with disabilities into societies, communities and economies. There are various theories and Maslow's theory gives five stages of life and fulfilment, including safety, belonging and basic needs, but also esteem, love and fulfilment. If we take that for all citizens, particularly people with disabilities, as a guiding light, we can make huge change.

The word "culture" has been used constantly at our committee.

There is no question or doubt but that a huge cultural change is needed in order that society integrates completely people with disabilities. Whether they are integrated into the school, the workplace or society at large, society and the world are better places for it.

We have a number of recommendations, and the members of the committee who are here will probably speak to a number of them. I will give just an overview of some of the recommendations and what we can do as a State and a Government. If we are to ask private citizens to do this, what can we do that will make a fundamental difference?

There has to be a quota in the public and State services for people with disabilities to integrate them more and more into society and to make sure they are in the workplace. I always used to say that if we could have Leinster House in rural Ireland, we might have more pro-rural policies. If we had more people with disabilities in the public sector and involved in the decision-making processes, policy would be disability-proofed.

We have discussed housing many a time at the Committee on Disability Matters. The building regulations refer to ramps and so on. Because we are talking about the rights of people with disabilities, it is hugely important we ensure they have a choice as to where they are to live. Where there is a quota for people with disabilities to work in the public sector, it will reflect society better and it will be easier. Such regulations should be in place.

We speak in the report about it being time to move on from congregated settings and about Article 19 of the UNCRPD. Slow progress is ensured by heavy reliance on emergency residential placement processes, moving individuals from large to smaller settings without their having a choice as to where to live and placing younger people with disabilities in nursing homes. One of the stark realities we heard about when the evidence was brought before us was that of young people living in nursing homes because of their disability. That is simply no longer acceptable in the Ireland of 2022. There has to be an urgency to how we will deal with those issues. It must be absolutely soul-destroying not only for the individual with a disability but also for the family, the carers and the community who support him or her to see that happening. I could speak of two or three families and individuals I talk to daily or weekly. I know the heartache and the pain that is behind their daily smiles because they are trying to get the right settings for their loved ones to live in. They want to make sure those loved ones have the opportunity or the chance to live with dignity in a home of their choice or accommodation that is suitable for them.

The committee has also called for the development of a national plan for the realisation of the right to independent living, including supports for agencies, and the reconfiguring of services to support that right. That must be undertaken in conjunction with an overarching policy framework to remedy the situation of people with disabilities aged under 65 who live in nursing homes. The committee also believes that people with disabilities living at home, many with elderly parents, can be left out when it comes to choosing and accessing independent living. Measures must be strengthened to access and to address that unmet need. On that point, many families of people who come from congregated settings bring loved ones or siblings or other family members into their own homes. When it comes to the adaptation grants or the various other grants available, all the income of the household is taken into account. That debars people from getting the basic grants for the individual because the house is not in their name or because of the household income. Two pensions and an occupational pension might be brought into account, and that is simply not right. We had the policy going back 20 years that the money follows the patient or the individual. That impediment in local authorities simply has to change. These are the small things we can change along the way to make sure people with a disability can live comfortably in their own homes or with family. It should be made possible for that impediment to be taken into account. I see the Minister of State nodding her head, and I welcome that, but is it possible to look at that and to see what we could do? When a person is coming from a congregated setting - he or she may have suffered an acquired brain injury - a huge change may need to be made to the house to accommodate him or her. Then, when State support is sought, it is simply not there.

Again, I thank the members of the committee. Our Vice Chair, Deputy Tully, and Deputies Ellis and Cairns are here in the Chamber. I thank them for their dedication to the work they do every Thursday morning and the compassion and empathy they show on a cross-party basis. We do not divide in one way or the other on politics. We have a job to do. We have to implement the UNCRPD. We have to ensure that when our committee has finished its work, we will have made better the lives of people with disabilities and the families and communities who care for them. I pay tribute to the members of the committee for the way they work in unison to make sure we get the best possible outcome. I have a raft of other issues in respect of the report that I would like to raise. I recommend the report to the House. I would like to see some of the recommendations in it implemented as soon as is humanly possible.

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