Finian McGrath (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

To this end, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection has embarked on a wide-ranging consultation process with people with disabilities, their families and their representative stakeholder groups. To ensure that this process is as inclusive as possible a cross-section of the disability sector has been invited to a Make Work Pay stakeholders focus group. This group has begun the process of agreeing the format and content of the wider consultation process. This wider process will then take place over the period October to January and it is anticipated that the consultation process will conclude by the end of the first quarter in 2018. I emphasise that people with disabilities will be at the heart of this process.

I know that Senators will be interested in the progress on the ratification of the UN convention. Ireland signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007 and, since then, successive Governments have emphasised Ireland’s strong commitment to proceed to ratification as quickly as possible, taking into account the need to ensure all necessary legislative and administrative requirements under the convention are met. I assure the House that ratification of the convention remains a high priority for me as Minister as well as the Government. Considerable progress has been made to overcome the remaining legislative barriers to Ireland’s ratification of the convention. The Assisted Decision-making (Capacity) Act 2015 was signed into law on 30 December 2015 and is a comprehensive reform of the law on decision-making capacity. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017 has reformed section 5 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993 to facilitate the full participation in family life of persons with intellectual disabilities and the full expression of their human rights. The Disability (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2016 was published immediately prior to Christmas and completed Second Stage in February 2017. The primary purpose of the Bill is to address the remaining legislative barriers to Ireland’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Work is ongoing on all the other issues set out in the previous Government’s roadmap for ratification published in October 2015, and these will be progressed as Committee Stage amendments. The Bill will be progressed to enactment at an early date to facilitate ratification of the UN convention as soon as possible. We have sought the Attorney General’s advice on how this process can be accelerated, but I should make the point that the precise timing of ratification now depends on how long it will take for this Bill to progress through the enactment process and on issues relating to the commencement of deprivation of liberty provisions, which will be included in the Bill on Committee Stage, and of the Assisted-decision Making (Capacity) Act 2015.

The major issue at this stage, which I would like to explain so as to reassure people, concerns the deprivation of liberty in the case of, for example, persons in nursing homes whose capacity to consent may be in doubt. This is a sensitive and important issue and we must get it right. Unfortunately, it is taking longer than expected, which I have found frustrating, to develop a proposal that is constitutionally sound and operationally effective and reasonable. The Department of Justice and Equality continues to engage with the Department of Health to assist with that work, but there is still some work to be done on the issue. While Ireland’s not having ratified the convention is a recurring point of criticism by the UN as well as domestic civil society, non-governmental organisations, Senators and Deputies, it is important to note that, in terms of quality of service and the actual position of people with disabilities in society, Ireland is in many respects in advance of other EU states. This is not to be complacent and we continue to take practical measures to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

The report of the Make Work Pay group was published earlier this year and already action, as announced at its launch by the then Minister for Social Protection and now Taoiseach, Deputy Leo Varadkar, the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris and myself, has been taken on its recommendations. As I mentioned, we have a comprehensive employment strategy in place and we have published the national disability inclusion strategy, which contains a wide range of practical commitments to improve the position of people with disabilities. This is an ongoing and inclusive process. At the heart of the decisions are three key stakeholders: the person with the disability, families and carers. We want to ensure that we reform and invest in disabilities services but, above all, to ensure that we respect the rights of the person with a disability and is at the centre of all the services.