Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)

Speaking at the launch of the five-year national human rights strategy for disabled people in Ireland, the Taoiseach said it was a "landmark moment for the advancement of disability rights in Ireland." Last week, with the budget, the Government cut vital cost-of-living supports for people with disabilities. This amounts to a €1,400 drop in income for people with disabilities across the State. While the Government announced a landmark moment in the achievement of disability rights in Ireland, at the same time, the same Government announced devastating setbacks for people with disabilities and many in their households. This Government is pushing one of the most vulnerable groups of people in society into poverty. It is predicted by the ESRI and the Parliamentary Budget Office that poverty will rise for people with disabilities in the coming years as a consequence of this budget.

We have a cost-of-living crisis that is affecting everyone in the same way, but for people with disabilities and their families it is far worse. They are constantly struggling. They have no disposable income and barely survive on a week-to-week basis. Ireland has the lowest disability employment in the EU. The reason for this is that people with a disability who are in receipt of social protection payment are afraid to take up part-time employment in case they lose that payment. We come across them all the time. The system is set up in a way to cut someone if they try to get work. God forbid if they decide to take up a part-time or full-time job; they will be banished from ever applying for disability payment again. We need to invest in disability services. If someone is able to do some part-time work, it does not mean they are automatically cured of their disability. Disability payments should continue to be paid while people take up employment, and should they have to cease that employment at any time, they should automatically go back to their full-time rate of disability payment without the need to go into a full 12-month application process all over again. That needs to happen. It does not happen.

When people are in poverty, it is not just being unable to buy something. It is the absence of ambition. It is the stress and tension that this causes in a family and a household that they cannot plan for the future or look forward. They become strangled by it. That is the real cost of poverty because it has a long-term cost as people go on in life that they have a fear of ever falling back into that place again. For people with a disability, they have that profound problem with the disability they have, but then they have the extra problem whereby poverty has been a part of their lives as they grew up, and as they go into adulthood, they fear that coming at them again. If the Government is serious about having disability rights, it needs to ensure that it stands over those rights, that it actually funds the services for people but also that people with disabilities have adequate incomes to be able to live full and proper lives.

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