Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this good motion. I have not been able to be present at this debate until now because I was at an online meeting with a range of campaigners on disability services of various sorts, including parents of children with additional needs, parents of children with scoliosis who are being badly failed by the State and disabled people themselves. What is brewing is a powerful alliance of all these groups. They are not small groups. If we consider the number of people affected, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people being badly neglected by the State. A potentially powerful alliance is being formed by these groups to demand what they deserve, which is basic services that mean they would not be disabled by society. That is the thing. Political choices are made to disable people and they demand that the necessary provisions be put in place to ensure that stops happening.

These campaigners have won important victories. Things are still very hard. There are incredible waiting lists. More than 100,000 children are waiting for necessary interventions. They are still being utterly failed, but by coming together and campaigning important victories have been won. The scrapping of the Green Paper, which was a horrific, Tory-style proposal, was a victory for disability campaigners and organisations which came together and put enough pressure on the Government to stop it. The fact the Government says that the optional protocol will be ratified is a victory. It is a victory for all those who have been campaigning. I cannot count the number of times there have been protests outside the Dáil asking for the optional protocol to be ratified. It is an important victory.

It would be better if the State protected people's rights in the first place to ensure they are not violated. The optional protocol is just one more tool in the hands of people who have already been let down and failed by the State to pursue their rights. It is good they will have that tool and the existence of that tool will put pressure on the State not to fail people in the way they are failed, but we know that currently, 24 or 25 families per month take the State to court for the State failing to follow its own laws on people's entitlement to assessments of need. If the Government was doing its job, there would be no need for anyone to take the State to court or make an individual complaint under the optional protocol. The fact these last resorts have become so vitally important is in itself an indictment of the Government's total failure to protect the rights of disabled people.

Last Friday, I hosted a public meeting in my constituency around disability services and the lack of access to appropriate school places for children with additional needs. Despite the fact that I nominally hosted it, I could not be there because I had Covid-19. However, I spoke to people who were there. It was a packed public meeting. This is a feature. The Minister of State will be aware that this is one of the few issues on which if a public meeting is put on, big numbers of people will come. It is because of, on the one hand, the sheer number of people - hundreds of thousands - who are affected and on the other, the profound impact it has on people's lives. A common theme that emerged from the meeting was that parents felt the State was effectively trying to wait them out, trying to fob them off again and again until their children turn 18 and age out of education, at which point the State will effectively abandon them completely.

It is striking. I presume it is the case for other TDs. In respect of the individual cases that come to me, the number one issue is homelessness and people facing eviction and so on, but the number two issue is parents of children with additional needs who are facing absolute horror. They have either recently discovered the issue, are trying to get what they need and are suddenly struck with the reality that this is a battle they will have for years, or parents who have been in the situation for years already and are going through various bouts of trying to contact public representatives and trying to make something happen. I cannot count the number of individual cases I have spoken about in the Dáil of people waiting literally for years with nothing happening. I mentioned recently the case of a woman who was first referred to the local CDNT in 2018 and recently got an email saying it hopes to deal with her at the end of 2025. This is common. These are not exceptions. The reality of what is happening is that people are just being fobbed off.

The other aspect - that is the CDNT-HSE aspect - is the inability of people to find an appropriate school place for their children. We should have a special class in every school in the State, but at the moment, fewer than one third of primary schools have autism classes and only 410 of 710 post-primary schools have autism classes. In Dublin 24, there is a peculiar situation. It is around the national average at primary school level, but it collapses at post-primary level. People are coming out of primary school and do not have an appropriate place. As a result, €80 million is spent annually on bussing 20,000 pupils with disabilities out of their localities to special classes and schools. It is unacceptable. It is unworkable for the children and families in every possible way.

These waiting lists and so on are not an accident. They are long by design. It is a Government strategy of penny-pinching and privatisation by stealth, that is, to force people to go private because they cannot bear to wait any longer. Úna Keightley who campaigns on scoliosis made the point at that meeting that people say to her that if they were in her situation, they would go private. The only reason she cannot go private is that it cannot be done with a child with scoliosis, because the ICU care that is necessary after an operation cannot be paid for in this country, the child cannot be taken on a plane and it is difficult to take the child on a boat. That illustrates the point that this is the situation.

Parents of children with additional needs come to me constantly. They have very limited resources and are getting loans from their own parents, credit unions and wherever else they can in order to just get some private therapy. In many cases, they cannot even get access to private therapists despite having the money.

Ultimately, all of this comes down to political choices around resourcing. We have a record €24 billion surplus. Therefore, if we are not providing the resources to have special classes in every school, the appropriate number of therapists and CDNTs across the country and appropriate therapists on school grounds, then it is a political choice. The Minister of State will say that there is a shortage of those people. That is true, but it is a question of planning and showing an intention now by significantly increasing the number of places in colleges and so on.

We support this motion. What it proposes is the bare minimum that any Government that cares about disabled people and their families would do. A genuinely left Government would do much more. In our alternative budget, we outlined costed proposals on significant investment in the additional SNAs, special education teachers and extra clinicians that are needed to clear assessment waiting lists and to ensure that no child was left behind. We outlined how the means test for carer’s allowance could be abolished. The €20 increase in disability payments proposed in this motion would be a start, but it would not be enough to provide disabled people with the decent standard of living that should be theirs as a human right. In a country with a surplus of €24 billion, there is zero justification for anyone to be living in poverty, especially any disabled person or anyone caring for someone with a disability. In our alternative budget, we proposed to introduce a €50-per-week cost-of-disability payment for all those on disability payments on top of increasing all weekly social welfare payments to €300. The Government has its own research that shows that simply being disabled in this country comes with substantial additional costs. Much of this reverts to the privatisation of what should be public health and education services, provided free at the point of use. Disabled people and their families are routinely forced to pay for private therapies and assessments rather than these being provided for free as part of a universal national health service.

See this speech in context