John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the new bright and shiny Minister of State. I will leave it at that. He has the wind in his back in regard to one thing. The following statement was made by the Taoiseach when he announced his Cabinet last Wednesday: "As a Government, we are renewing our commitment to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities this year and to improving services available to people with disabilities". We are dealing with one critical element of that.

I thank Senator Freeman and her co-sponsors, Senators Craughwell and O'Donnell, who has just spoken. As someone in the other House said a number of years ago, I feel like my clothes have been stolen because I will not be as eloquent as Senator O'Donnell.

I want to start by saying a child is not a small adult.I was speaking to a paediatrician a few years about medication and I asked whether one simply halved the dose if the patient was a child. I was told that was not the case because the metabolism is different. Senator Marie-Louise O'Donnell was spot on. We should bring ourselves back 20, 30, 40 or 50 years and recall how we saw the world as children. How a child or a young adult sees the world is very different and that space is being shrunk now. It is meshing, as has been said. That is a core thing to recall in this discussion.

Senator Devine was very pointed when she talked about the things, without being too overt about it, that happen and can be seen in an adult psychiatric facility. One would not bring a child to see an over-18s movie. How does one then have them in a place where adults may be quite disturbed? We should be able to strip back the layers and say this is unconscionable.

Senator Kelleher has been very strong on community supports and I will not say too much more about it. Having good community infrastructure and supports both within the health sphere and beyond in education, etc., is critical. One wants to have the appropriate facilities for children and young people in terms of admission, but one does not want to need a lot of it. We want to head off as much as we can. It needs to be planned and appropriate.

In thinking about this since coming into the Chamber, I have been trying to imagine what it is like. I was thinking of being hospitalised due to polio when I was 11. I went to a hospital with a children's ward in it. The only thing I did not like was that there was also a school in it. The Minister of State, as a teacher, will forgive me for saying that. In a sense, that was a normalisation of it. All the staff and the things I saw around me were child and young-person specific. The orthopaedic surgeons may have also worked on the adult side, but they behaved in a way that was appropriate for children when they walked into that space. The man who delivered newspapers and comics, the porters and others did the same. The space will create or encourage the appropriate behaviour. Children can also help each other in their own ways. There is a sadness in it, but we also accept the importance of hospice care for children. We must likewise accept that there must be appropriate spaces and relationships for children and young people.

Young people, particularly teenagers, are not keen to be routinely in the company of their parents, even though they bankroll them and do a great deal else for them. How, then, should they be placed in an adult space in which people are going through very difficult times? If this was easy to solve, it would have been solved. However, it needs to come to an end. If we are to have anything left there for a while, it should only be exceptions. It is not acceptable and that has to be hammered home. It is what the Bill is about and we take it from there. I am hopeful about the new spirit the Taoiseach has brought to this issue and his support for ratifying the UN convention. This is one lovely piece of it. We are talking about people who have a lifetime ahead of them. Is that a lifetime where they can look back well on a place or situation which was difficult for them or will it be haunted by what happened?