Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Michael Moynihan for his opening contribution. I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak with all Members and those listening in this evening. Deputy Moynihan was quite right when he talked about the number of people who tune into the Joint Committee on Disability Matters because it matters to them. There is a huge population who tune in. I want to pay tribute to all of the members of the committee. I do not want to single out any individual because I know every one of them works as a collective to put the person at the centre.

What changed in this Government and the Thirty-second Dáil was the formation of the Joint Committee on Disability Matters. I have said this numerous times at this stage. The dial is changing on disability. The expectation is higher - the bar has been raised and now it is time for delivery. The joint committee has enabled putting the person at the centre. It has also made that opportunity for me as a Minister of State to be a believer. I can lean on it to actually push against officialdom, break down barriers and align disability exactly as it is supposed to be with regard to the United Nations Convention on The Rights of Persons With Disabilities, UNCRPD.

We should look at the child or person in the whole from the cradle to the grave in the scenario the Deputy outlined, although I do not know whether he got past 13. If we had that whole-plan approach and look at how we do it from the start, we would learn that when a child is born with a congenital condition and that diagnosis is known, that is actually accepted within bureaucracy. It is not necessary to redo the paperwork at the entry into early years education and school or at the transition to secondary school and day services or residential care. We do not need to do it. We only need to do it once. That would mean people's domiciliary care, and carers, would be sorted because the ability of our most loved would not have to be downtrodden. That is what we have to do here. We have to level down all the time to get recognised. That is what families have to do. That is not the way it should be, however. What I have seen within the Thirty-second Dáil is a changing of that dial.

I thank all Members for enabling us to have that opportunity and put a voice on it. Some day we will get past the Thursday evening slot and make it on to the Wednesday slot where we are prime central. We will be in the middle of the Topical Issue debate and not at the end of it. We will have really landed when we get a Tuesday slot, the premium slot. We are getting there, however, because at least I am in this Chamber on a regular basis where Deputies hold me to account. When they do so, they are holding the Department to account, but they are also holding the agency to account. When I talk about the agency, the agency in this case is the HSE because it is the agency that answers to me. As Minister of State with responsibility for disability, the Joint Committee on Disability Matters has enabled me to step outside the comfort zone of just the specialist disability services. It has allowed us to talk to people. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, believes in equality and equity as much as I do. Sometimes we do not use that long departmental title: we say "Minister for Equality" because that is what it is front and centre.

That is why in the budget this year, the Minister looked at the access and inclusion model, AIM, and at expanding that programme to ensure that children with disabilities could have a longer opportunity in the early years setting. I have just arrived back from Boyerstown National School in the last half hour. The special education department, along with the principal, Mr. Cathal Ó Bric, and a very good special educational needs, SEN, teacher, Ms Smith, accommodated Willow Carroll and another little child in attending mainstream classes. These are children who are born with complex medical needs but are able to attend mainstream education because the Department of Education enabled them to actually put an addition to the classroom. Not only have they got an SEN and two special needs assistants, SNAs, but Mr. John Carney is now working with us within the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, to ensure that we have nursing care to support that child to go mainstream in her local national school, but also to go to the same school as her brother so that their mother only has to make one drop-off. That is where we need to be going. That is a good example of what good looks like. That is where the UNCRPD is being aligned to. More autism spectrum disorder, ASD, classes have been added to mainstream national and secondary schools. That is, yet again, where education is aligning with the rights of the child to participate in education equal to their brothers, sisters, neighbours and peers within education.

We might look at that transition planning piece. The child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, in County Wexford was able to recruit four social care workers as a result of the dormant account funding it received. It could see how best to support a family and child and ascertain whether they all needed to go to day services or whether other opportunities were there for them. Yet again, what they were able to do when they could afford social care was to go to special classes and special schools and actually work with parents and young people. They could listen to the voices of young people to see what their ambitions were, where they would like to attend school, what they would like to do at another level and what sort of training they would like to receive. This year in the community healthcare organisation, CHO, 5 area, 116 children did not have to attend day services. They were given the opportunities with either the national learning network and education and training board, ETB, to actually focus on their will and preference. That is again aligning with the UNCRPD. When children come through that and want to go on to third level, it is important to ensure that we have the personal assistant, PA, support. We have not gotten that right yet. To be very fair to the Minister, Deputy Harris, and I want to be fair to him, he is enabling it through education. However, the access to that PA support needs to be mainstreamed first. That would then be aligning with the UNCRPD. It is not there; it is ad hoc. It is hit and miss depending on the geographic location of people's CHO. They are at the behest of who makes that decision to ensure they can access those hours. The hours for a PA are not the same as for a home support worker. It is a completely different understanding. It is enabling people to participate and have the fullest life they can whether it is going to the table quiz on a Friday night, the cinema on a Saturday night or the Aviva Stadium to see a rugby match. It is their will and preference as to how they would actually use and assist with their PA support. We have much work to do on that. With the assistance of the Joint Committee in Disability Matters, we are breaking down the barriers. We have a clear understanding of what a PA is and know the difference between a PA and a home support worker, and that is really important. However, the PA that people have in higher education could actually become a person's best buddy, enabling him or her into employment or going to the next level.

Employment is the one piece I think we got right this time in the budget. What we got right was something that in actual fact we were trying to do for three years. The Irish Business and Employers Confederation, IBEC, has been saying it all along. If we could reduce the wage subsidy scheme from the mandatory 21 hours back to 15 hours, it would give employers a better opportunity. It was delivered this time in the budget. I am delighted to see it there. Now, it will only work, and it can only work, if the PA support is there for it. In the budget I have done this year, I have yet again invested more into PA services, but what I need to happen now is the understanding of that connectivity. Part of raising people out of that poverty threshold is ensuring that the PA is available for individuals.

The PA home support piece at the moment is not legislated by any manner or means. My fear is that if I were to put it on a legislative footing this second, it would stall the progress of the investment I want to make. At all times, I am trying to ensure that we keep progress going. I imagine that we should be able to do both but at the moment I do not want to stall the investment because I am looking at the disability capacity action plan. Within that, I have three priorities, which are respite care, residential care and PAs. I am looking at them as the catalyst to future development and actually addressing the barriers that young people and not so young people have with regard to the prism through which they view the world. In order to keep the family unit together, I believe we need to start at the very beginning and have that respite care piece. We are adding capacity into that. The budget that will be delivered this year will be the largest budget on respite we have ever seen. The PA aspect is another piece of it. The residential care aspect addresses many of the emergency cases. We need to have the multiannual funding put in place. Hopefully, the disability action plan, when it is launched, will give the providers that actually do provide much of our residential support the comfort to know there is a pot of money that will be layered out over the next four years and then in the four or five years thereafter to build in capacity. When I cross other Departments, I see the issues they have in aligning themselves through the UNCRPD and the challenges that poses.

I talk about the Department of Transport, for example. We all know that our day services depend on the number of buses that are in this country at the moment. At the same time, we have so many organisations that have so many buses but they stand up for such a portion of the time as well. It bothers me to think that when I drive to Galway on a Saturday, and I go by Brothers of Charity and there are 54 buses just stood up at Rosedale, that those buses are sitting idle. That, to me, is not sweating the asset of a resource. We also to have to look at how we can pool our assets and how we can look at what other models would like. The Leitrim model, and the HSE open routes Local Link project is a really good example, as is Accessible Community Transport Southside, ACTS, which has other partners in the Dublin side where they have pooled together their resources. They are able to not just carry one person with a wheelchair, they are able to bring four wheelchairs. A person is able to book that bus and they can bring their friends, if they so wish, to go out.

We have to look at how we can do it better. That is why I secured once-off funding of €5 million in the budget to look at the whole transport piece. We can be innovative, we can look at it differently, and we can look at the urban-rural piece. I see that access to transport will be one of the biggest barriers to accessing employment, education and the equal right to participate. They have it already cracked in the ACTS system here in Dublin but the only problem is that its fleet is ageing. That is why I got extra funding. I want to review what ACTS has in an urban setting, which one could cross over three community health organisations, CHOS, 6, 7 and 9. Then I would also like to see it out in a more rural space, the likes of the Galways, to see how the fund could be used. How it works is that one is collected by the provider and can be brought to day services. It might be St. Michael's House here, or Stewarts Care here or another provider there but there is an organised route. It is not everybody going out of different organisations. That, to me, is disorganised and a waste of money. We can do it an awful lot better, and that is aligning to the UNCRPD.

Young people participating in sport is another area, and I am delighted that the Minister of State at the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Deputy Thomas Byrne, has made disability one of the requirement pillars within the sports capital programme. The reason for this is that we need to move away from tokenism. There has to be a proper service agreement in order that young people and not-so-young people have access to where the State spends funding on investing in clubs and infrastructure, and that everybody within the community has access to that infrastructure.

The Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Heather Humphreys is doing the same with regard to where she is putting in the regional hubs, and the accessibility within them. People who are neurodiverse might not want to get on the train, go in the car or go into Galway. However, they might be very happy to work in Comworks in Loughrea, where they would have their own room but would be able to participate in a working environment. I also want to acknowledge that under this Government, we have learned how to do remote working spaces far better. We have put sensory spaces, lifts and accessibilities into them. That is down to a lot of the work that Deputies have done in the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Disability Matters, from listening and talking to parents and other people. I think that if we do not put the person at the centre, we will not move forward.

This morning, I launched the National Disability Authority, NDA's big workshop in the Aviva Stadium, and the theme of it was participation of persons with disabilities in politics. How we will really see the change of the dial is when we see more people with either physical or hidden disabilities participating in public life. That will be really welcome. We need to move across all the Departments and align them very well. A lot of Departments have come on board really well. The last Department - and it is not by leaving it last that I am picking it out - is the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. We want to have people live their best, independent life - be it independent, supported independent or within the community space - and ensure that when we design a house we design it so it is universally accessible and meets the ageing needs of the population, and that no matter who access that property regardless of their age or ability, it would be universally accessible to young and old. On that last piece, I will come back in again with any comments later on.

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