Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Good afternoon. This important issue involves several Departments, but it should most be heard by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, which I hope will resolve it using joined-up thinking.

In my county of Carlow, a number of services provide day and residential supports for those living with disabilities. Many offer supports to people in local authority or private homes who need day services. All of those using day services in some way qualify for free travel, but they cannot access it. If they lived in Dublin, Galway, Cork or Limerick there would be no problem. In rural Carlow, however, they fall victim to the postcode disadvantage. The free travel scheme, which was introduced by the former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, in 1967, has been a lifeline for many in urban areas but is increasingly not of benefit to those in rural Ireland who must travel just to avail of it, meaning it is not free at all. There is no public transport link around County Carlow. There are public bus and train services to major cities, but there is nothing internal. A new public scheme has not even been put out to tender yet, and it may well be 2021 before there is any movement in that regard.

In the meantime, and due to the limited amount of residential places available, individuals are being allocated local authority homes via social housing agencies in partnership with service providers and the HSE on the understanding that they can receive day care services. Despite this, no provision has been made to get them to those services. Many living in their own homes or supported living residential settings require support to travel to the services on a daily basis.All of the main organisations in the Carlow area delivering day services provide limited transport to families from within existing resources, which is an ongoing struggle for them and all agree it is not sustainable and fails to meet the needs of all of the individuals who require transport support. While these providers sometimes receive partial funding from the HSE, it is not enough and they have to stretch budgets elsewhere in to provide dignity and services to these very vulnerable people.

All of the service providers in the Carlow area that offer services to people with disabilities strive to do so in line with the national policy, New Directions so that a standardised, person-centred, quality approach to service provision to individuals with disabilities can be delivered throughout the county. Access to transport to day services is an ongoing challenge for service users, parents and service providers and is far from a standardised and appropriate response to individual needs.

In the absence of a national policy to support individuals to travel to their chosen day service, we have an inadequate and unfair system in terms of how people are supported to travel to their respective day services throughout the country. A clear direction nationally regarding how people with disabilities can be supported to access services, particularly in rural areas, is required and a mechanism to fund such a policy needs to be agreed and implemented as soon as possible. This is vital to those with disabilities. A future policy decision could consider the option of a service that is providing transport to an individual entitled to free travel being able to reclaim that cost from the appropriate Department. People on the Aran Islands and Tory Island can use their free travel pass, yet people living on the hills of Carlow cannot.

This Government refuses to replace the mobility allowance, a payment previously made to people with severe disabilities in respect of public transport costs for taxis and so on to enable them to get around for social and health reasons. A memorandum on proposals for a new transport support scheme was brought to Cabinet but was later withdrawn in favour of revised proposals. I was disappointed to hear this. I would like to know what is happening in this regard and what the Department is doing to ensure those people who need to access transport to a therapy service can get that access. These people have free travel passes issued by the Department. This is incredibly unfair. It is unfair of this Government to expect service providers to lose out in respect of service provision that is essential to persons living with a disability. Many of our local stations are not wheelchair accessible and they have no toilet facilities. When will people living with disabilities be treated with the respect they need and deserve?

I acknowledge that this is a matter for the HSE and the Departments of Transport, Tourism and Sport and the Employment Affairs and Social Protection. Someone somewhere in they system needs to examine it with a view to identifying what can be done to get these people the service to which they are entitled. The ethos of these service providers is equality, dignity, privacy, safety and respect for their service users. We need to find a way to support them in whatever way we can so that users can enjoy the opportunity to be the very best.