Seanad debates

Tuesday, 21 March 2017

2:30 pm

Photo of John DolanJohn Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I am happy to have an opportunity to be involved in this debate.

Earlier the Minister said we are "experiencing a jobs-led and job-rich recovery". His comment does not resonate with the people that I am particularly interested in but I shall come back to this matter in a moment.

The comments and input by Senator Ardagh strongly resonate with much of what I want to say about people with disabilities, different conditions and whatever, and the issues with JobPath vis-à-visCE schemes. The ESRI published a report by Dorothy Watson in the past few days. Let me give a flavour of the report. It states:

31% of working-age people with a disability were at work compared with 71% of those without a disability. For those without a disability, the rate of job entry picked up in the recovery period and the rate of exit dropped. However, there was little sign of a recovery for people with a disability by 2015. Overall, the odds of employment entry are nearly four times lower for people with a disability. People with a disability remain about half as likely to enter employment. The odds of employment exit are twice as high for people with a disability.

I am referring to the findings of the ESRI; it is not me with a hunch.

The report continues:

ImplicationsGovernment policy is to facilitate the employment of people with a disability who want to work - an estimated additional 36,000 people with disabilities.  Our calculations show that if all people with a disability who wanted to work had a job, half of them would be at work (instead of 31%).

I shall note some areas of specific importance that were mentioned in the report as follows: retention of medical cards when people move into employment; support for additional costs of disability itself; flexibility in how jobs are structured, including the hours and jobs tasks; and ensuring that there is equal treatment in access to services such as health, transport and other areas. I call the following the determinants of employment for people - health, social services, cost of disability payment, cost of getting to work, transport, training and education.

My involvement in the areas of disability and, indeed, the training and employment for disabled people dates back to the early 1980s. I remember a scheme called Teamwork, community employment schemes, social employment schemes and the more recent schemes, and vis-à-visJobPath and CE programmes. Let me say the following from my own gut and experience. The possibility for people to do something, particularly in their local community, with people they know and in organisations that they know, which are often community sports, disability groups or whatever, is the real deal maker for people to gain employment. It means people receive encouragement from the people that they know in that place. I have been a member of the Irish Wheelchair Association and I have seen people go on to jobs in the open labour market because somebody would have told them there is a job going and encouraged them to apply.Somebody will literally take them by the hand and encourage them to do that. That is how it works.

Senator Ardagh mentioned the issue of JobPath in a sense colonising the possibility of people going into community employment programmes when they want to do otherwise. We know that some people would go the other way if they were offered an opportunity for training or work but there are people who want to do it and we should find every way we can to make that happen.

The comprehensive employment strategy for people with disabilities should have been in place in January or February 2013 but it did not see the light of day until 2 October 2015 in the wake of the general election. Its first annual report is about to be made public, 18 months after it started. Among the issues raised by the chairman and others is that the Government needs to make a significant start in implementing its public service wide commitment to a 6% quota.

An allied issue is that the possibility of activation without real prospects is disingenuous. People with disabilities need that chain of opportunity if they cannot move into the workspace. There have been huge improvements in the area of education in the past decade and a half. That is good but, dare I say it, it is bad in another sense. If those people pass the leaving certificate but do not get on to the education and training board scheme or go to college, they fall back into a HSE day programme or one run by one of the voluntary organisations. That is a killer for people. Ways must be found to keep them on the trajectory into employment and activity.

Last summer, in the run-up to the budget, I pressed the Minister for a package that would particularly support people with disabilities in terms of income supports and costed disability payments, which is part of the issue in terms of getting back into work. The Minister said he did not favour an increase for people with disabilities or particular groups. There was a €5 increase across the board in the budget, which was very welcome for everybody. I draw to the Minister's attention that on 1 February this year, the CSO published statistics that thankfully indicated that the route out of poverty was beginning to work for the general population and that there was some small improvement for people. However, in its next sentence it stated that people with disabilities are falling further and more strongly into poverty. That is a real issue. I refer to employment, transport, other related supports and training in particular. I call on the Minister to look specifically at this area. We saw many disabled people designed, to use that word, out of activation programmes because they had become unemployed during the recession. There must be a major start in terms of tailored programmes for people with disabilities and mental health needs in order that they can get moving in that direction. We have invested so well but more needs to be done in terms of education. That becomes less of an investment if we cannot keep people moving in the right direction. I thank the Minister.

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