Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I pay tribute to the Chair and Vice Chair of the disability matters committee for their work in leading this report and to the members for their contributions, as well as the secretariat staff who worked very hard to put this together. As a recent member of the committee, I take no credit for the report or its recommendations. It would not be appropriate for me to claim credit, but I am a very proud member of the committee and it is an honour to work with very dedicated and passionate members from Government and Opposition sides, who are also very knowledgeable. I like to think that in the time remaining in this Oireachtas I will bring something to the committee through my training as an engineer and my background as an active travel campaigner as well.

I take the opportunity to praise the Minister of State in this House - I have done so in the committee, but it is appropriate to do so also in the Chamber - for her leadership on the issue of disability and making progress. Deputy Tully made a very fine contribution and certainly fulfilled her role as an Opposition Deputy. It was very interesting to listen to her. Notwithstanding all the points that were made and that are clearly outlined in the report, praise is due to the Minister of State.

The Minister of State began by saying the rights of people with disabilities must be central to all Departments.

She has heard me relay this story previously, which I will not dwell on, of the trip to the Netherlands some years ago and seeing so many more people with disabilities outside enjoying themselves, travelling around their towns and cities and between them. They were able to do so because the Netherlands takes transport serious the point of view of people with disabilities. While responsibility does not rest with the Minister of State’s Department, as a very strong advocate for people with disabilities, I am sure she will impress upon the Minister for Transport and the Minister of State at the Department the importance of putting disability front and centre of their thinking with respect to policy and funding when it comes to transport because getting it right is fundamental for all of us and how we live our lives. If we get it wrong for any cohort in our society, it is very difficult for them to live their lives whether through accessing employment, education, going to the shops or going to church. We have to get transport right from the perspective of people with disabilities.

When National Transport Authority, NTA, officials appeared before the committee recently, I took the opportunity to ask them what they were doing. They were at the committee for a reason, namely, to speak on the authority's role. They spoke about various different design issues with respect to the built environment, the provision of suitable buses, ramps and so on. It was all absolutely appropriate that they would do so. However, I made the point that for that cohort of people with disabilities who are dependent on mobility devices such as wheelchairs, the roll-out of the networks in our towns, villages and cities is critically important. It is wrong to say these networks are for cyclists. They are not for cyclists; they are for the people who are not cycling at the moment. They are for the people who could use those networks, including people in wheelchairs. That is what I witnessed in the Netherlands. The NTA’s role from the perspective of disability is to roll out these networks as quickly as possible. I do not pretend that is easy; there are huge political challenges because if these continuous networks that are separated from road traffic and connected in such a way that they are useful for people are to be created, then it is also about how street space is used. There are the challenges of where parking is provided, what to do with carriageways, whether footpaths can be widened and whether an active travel lane can be put in. These are very challenging tasks but it was important to impress on the NTA officials the importance of not only looking at niche areas when it comes to disability such as the provision of adaptive vehicles and so on but also the built environment itself. I raised continuous footpaths. Department of Transport officials were present and the Chair kindly wrote to them and impressed on them the rolling out a policy on continuous footpaths because if the footpath is dished every couple of metres that makes it a hostile environment for a person with a mobility device. That is critically important. As far as I know, there is not an appropriate policy in that regard.

Finally, I want to pay tribute to the late Bob Hannan, senior architect in Dún Laoghaire, who died just this week. I mentioned him earlier in the House because he was one of the key figures behind driving the coastal mobility route in Dún Laoghaire. It has been a great success for children in the community who can walk and cycle safely to school now and for everyone else. It has also been a great success for people with disabilities. It is a great legacy for Bob Hannan. He had a vision for infrastructure that is suitable for all cohorts of our society and before he died, he managed to see that through. Before he was involved in design of this kind of infrastructure, he was involved in housing and universal design. It was something he was very expert in and it is only right that we pay tribute to these kinds of people in our community who work tirelessly for all sections of the community in their professional work as well as outside it.

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