Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This is an important debate. There is nobody who suffers from hearing issues in the Houses of the Oireachtas. Somebody has to be their voice. I thank the Cathaoirleach for the work he has done over the years, and the Minister of State for putting all of the support behind the hard work that has been done. It is important that we thank the working group. Politicians are great at talking but we are not experts in different areas. We heard from experts.

I refer to the working group. I want to acknowledge the work of the Irish Council for Sign Language Interpreters, the Irish Deaf Society, the Centre for Deaf Studies in Trinity College, Dublin, Chime and members of the deaf community who gave of their time voluntarily and repeatedly, and provided proper input into the process which resulted in a useful Act with super recommendations.

I want to highlight a couple of people from my own experience. I have full hearing and do not have any concept of what it is like to be deaf. An amazing woman called Marion Lafferty from my village, Inagh, had a child who is deaf. The people in the area are friendly. She gave free classes to people of every age. It was super. I went to them 20 years ago. I am chatty, but I did not know how to communicate with her son. However, as she had set up free classes we were able to communicate. It was amazing. I hope those kinds of supports will be provided under the Act so that it is not always the case that parents have to provide extra support so their children can have links with communities. What she did was remarkable because it enabled her son and I to connect.

There was a deaf unit in Holy Family Junior National School in Ennis. Noreen O'Connell worked tirelessly there for years and did a lot of work with the children of the deaf community. I did a project with some of them when I was working to get them to park and stride and walk to school. I spoke to a group of children who had hearing impairments of different severity. One little girl told me that because she cannot hear cars, it is very difficult to know how fast they are going. We do not realise it, but we use our hearing a lot to dictate how fast things are moving because of the sound. Thanks to her writing a letter and working with me, extra seconds were added to the green man outside the school. If we have not listened to her perspective that would not have happened.

The most important thing is that we listen to deaf people and those with expertise. That is why we have come to where we are today, where we have a strong Act. I again thank everyone for all of their work and look forward to supporting them in any way I can. I always subtitle my videos. It is a token thing, but I have done that consciously because I was made aware of these issues by people like Marion Lafferty in my village many years ago. I have to improve my vocabulary.