Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the students from Malahide and the Croatian ambassador as he visited the House. I also wish to express our solidarity with Croatia today. Today I want to talk about accessibility. We have come a long way in this country in recent years. In these Houses in the past 15 years, accessibility has been facilitated in many ways but even this Chamber is still not fully accessible. Yesterday our colleague, Councillor Vicki Casserly and her son James were here. James has been highlighting very effectively some of the accessibility issues for wheelchair users throughout the country. He joins a litany of other wheelchair users who have done this recently, including Paralympian Kerrie Leonard who has been very good at this as well, particularly in the context of sports.

I want to raise an issue in my own area. One of my neighbours, Owen Stubbs, is a 23-year-old wheelchair user who lives in Knocksinna in Foxrock. He and his father Graham now have to take a local developer to court over the effective extinction of a right of way that was available to Owen previously which shortened his journey to a bus stop nearby. The laneway that he would use is now being replaced by the developer, Richmond Homes, with a series of steps. It is a nonsensical and unfair step by the developers. It was not done unknowingly, because I know the family took great pains to ensure the developer was aware of it. The particular development has caused untold difficulties for people in that area, not the development itself but the access routes. It now goes through a quiet residential road to Newtownpark Avenue, which will create traffic problems instead of accessing directly the N11. We are told that is because of regional planning guidelines. I know we do not have time to go into that. The notion that any developer or body would essentially reject the expressions of a local resident who is going to be massively discommoded by steps being put into a place like that is perhaps indicative of further overreach by developers but also a failure of local authorities to enforce this. Part of the planning conditions for this development was for that lane, which is a public right of way, to remain fully and publicly accessible to the public. Steps are still accessible to people who are not in a wheelchair but the public includes everybody in the public. You cannot have a situation where a mechanism is put in place that excludes some members of the public and not others. I want us to make it very clear that we support accessibility measures and do not accept situations where any individual, entity, local authority or State or Government agency is taking steps to reduce accessibility. I support Owen Stubbs in his campaign to make sure that this remains a properly public and accessible right-of-way. I hope he is successful in that regard. I hope everybody involved sees the sense in removing steps and ensuring we have a properly accessible facility for everyone who lives in that area, including those in wheelchairs.