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 "Aligning Disability Services with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities", copies of which were laid before Dáil Éireann on 23rd February, 2023.

I welcome the opportunity to speak to this report. The report was laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas back in March of this year. We are delighted to have an opportunity to speak on it. In the first instance, I will speak about our committee and the work that we do. We are one of the first parliaments in the world to have a committee that deals exclusively with disability matters. I pay enormous tribute to the members of the committee for their work and their dedication to the job at hand. Every one of them put in an awful lot of work prior to the summer on Thursday mornings and, more lately, on Wednesday evenings. We also have a large background team who are very dedicated and who do a whole pile of work behind the scenes to make sure we can advance the cause of people with disabilities, their families and their communities.

In our meetings, we are charged with making the lives of people with disabilities better. Some of the evidence we hear every week is harrowing, challenging and very difficult because the lives of people with disabilities and the way they have been treated across the spectrum over the years leaves an awful lot to be desired. As I said on appointment as Chair and again in every passing week as we have heard evidence, there is no doubt in my mind that, in the future, there will be a Taoiseach coming to this House to apologise for the way people with disabilities have been treated. I can see that coming.

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, to the debate. I thank her for her stewardship of the disabilities portfolio and for her great, earnest and decent hard work in what she is doing in the Department. She has worked together with us and showed camaraderie. She certainly challenges the system. We have to continue to challenge that system.

As a committee, we work specifically to implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, and to ensure that it is brought across in each and every Department. This is a landmark convention secured under the UN. We ratified it in 2018 and each and every Department in the State is challenged to work with this framework in mind.

Since our report was published, the Minister of State's portfolio has moved from the Department of Health to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The key word in that title is "equality". It has moved to the Department dealing with equality, which gives me hope that we are moving towards equality for people with disabilities. Reform is under way and a challenge has been laid down right across the spectrum with regard to how we deliver services for people with disabilities.

In the time I have, I will speak on a number of issues. I could talk about the complexity of disability services and how they are delivered within the community. People come in to us every week from communities across the length and breadth of the country to talk about how services are affecting them, their service providers and their communities. Sometimes, we have to say that we are ashamed at the way these things have been done and that change is crucial and needed.

To take the matter from the cradle to the grave, back in the mid-1960s, because of community need, community organisations were set up to deliver services for people with disabilities on a voluntary and charitable basis. In the south of Ireland, such organisations include the Cope Foundation and St. Joseph's Foundation in Charleville. St. Joseph's Foundation was brought together by a local GP, Dr. Martin O'Donnell, and others within the town. That also happened with CoAction West Cork, Kerry Parents and Friends Association, St. Mary's, the Brothers of Charity and others.

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This was community-led. That was the modus operandithrough which the State was delivering services to people with disabilities over the years. There was a block grant and the organisations did what they could.

It is vitally important that those section 39 organisations continue because they have an ethos within their communities and are rooted within them, and if we move to a nationwide system, it becomes bureaucratic where everybody can stand behind the bureaucracy and decisions being made by their superiors or by the system. If one has locally-led deliveries like the section 39 organisations, they are very close to their communities and can see the challenges for families.

To that end, the decisions made a week and a half ago on the pay settlement are important to ensure that goes right through, and that pay parity becomes the norm as we go forward into new pay rounds. That is the delivery of service.

The system for children who are looking for an assessment of need and for therapies is failing. There are many challenges with bringing in staff and recruitment and ensuring the professionals are there. Even at primary or early in post-primary school, we should be talking about speech and language courses, occupational therapy, and about the needs that are there, and the great sense of fulfilment speech and language therapists, physiotherapists or occupational therapists get from advancing the lives of others. It is of great importance that that is done.

The challenge I see in that regard is that people are qualifying and then go into private practice. Over the past number of years I have seen those young people leaving public practice to go into private practice because they are so frustrated by the public system. If one takes any other walk of life, people start out in the private sector and they migrate into the public sector. In this instance, with regard to therapies and therapists, in particular, there is a sense that they cannot work in the system. They get frustrated and if they are seeing, four, five or six patients a day, somebody is coming along to say that person is seeing too many patients or is pushing the boat out.

We have the assessment of need and the therapies for young people and we must ensure primary school places are available. Thankfully, in many communities across the country, particularly in rural communities - it is a challenge in urban communities - autism spectrum disorder, ASD, units are being built and opened. From what I have seen and from the contact I have with parents and communities, it is more difficult to get that level of service in urban communities. It is something we need to be very careful of because that service is needed in rural and urban Ireland.

Primary schools have been very innovative probably because they are growing up from the community. They have community boards of management, are community-led and are very much ingrained in it. We have difficulties when children move from there to post-primary education. The issue with regard to post-primary education is that the places are not there at the moment and it will take a number of years before they are put in place. Construction can be very frustrating, with the various stages schools have to go through to get new buildings.

I could speak for about two hours on this topic but I have only reached the child aged 13 so far. In the remaining five minutes available to me, I would say that the evidence is that the system is too cumbersome and there is no consistency within it if somebody wants help by way of personal assistants, PAs. If home care packages are in place, a person is given a half an hour here and 20 minutes there.

Even yesterday, at our committee meeting, the word "attitude" was mentioned by one of our witnesses. When that person was getting on a airplane, it was announced over the intercom that the plane would be delayed taking off because the crew was having difficulty putting the wheelchair on the aeroplane. In all fairness, if that happened to other minority groups within society, it would be highlighted the length and breadth of the country. That is the attitude. I do not know whether it is a charity attitude. It pains me to say this but sometimes I think some people have an attitude that people with disabilities are a burden on society. Far from it because if we had a totally inclusive society, with what people with disabilities can contribute and in how they can make our society better and stronger and give all of us a sense of what a holistic society is like, I believe it can be massive. There is also an attitude in some sections of the HSE when people are looking for services where some people believe that it is out of their grandmother's purse they are giving the extra support to families. That is simply not acceptable.

We have a considerable distance yet to go and a great amount of work to do. Our committee and this report has taken on board all of the statistics and the information, and I have to pay tribute to everybody who has been so honest in coming in and giving their evidence so that we can compile this report and can lay it before the Oireachtas and ask the Government and all of those authorities to implement it. There is no point in us doing reports otherwise. We have a number of reports and we believe we need to compile them and put the evidence out there.

If somebody asked me coming into this debate today for one or two things I would like to see changed with regard to how our committee works and how we are able to change the lives of people with disabilities, I would say it is attitude. Recently, the Minister of State spoke about the negotiations at which she said people were talking about money but she was talking about people. It is important that we understand we are talking about citizens of this republic and about people who can and are making a very significant contribution to their families and to their communities. The Joint Committee on Disability Matters must try to effect change to ensure the lives of people with disabilities are changed right now and into the future and that that their lives matter within society.

Over the years I have met many parents and people who are looking for extra services and they have mentioned the pain they go through fighting the system. When they get to old age, they nearly give up fighting because they have had to spend so much time challenging the system to get the services. Many families have contacted me about watching our Joint Committee on Disability Matters, whether it is on a Thursday morning or Wednesday afternoon. They feel that because of the contribution of members of the committee from all sides of the Houses, and I have to pay tribute to all of them, that we are trying to keep the noise going. I constantly say that while we can bang the drum, we have to start banging it even louder because there is a very significant unmet need within our society for people with disabilities.

We must change the attitude, where everyone is an equal citizen, whether able-bodied or disabled - almost one fifth of the population of this country has a disability of one type or another, which is a fair number of people - and that they matter. When we put the name "disability matters" on the committee three years ago, it was because we wanted to ensure people who had disabilities understood that their families and their communities mattered.

I thank the House for the opportunity to speak on this matter. I commend the report to the House. Unfortunately, I have another disability event to attend to at 5.30 p.m. but I again express my thanks for this opportunity and pay tribute to those on the committee, who gave so earnestly of their time and for their dedication, and to our background team, who do an amazing job in our committee.

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