Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Fine Gael group, I express our sympathies regarding the ten people who lost their lives in County Donegal. Their families, communities, neighbours and friends and the people of Donegal have suffered considerably. This loss will be felt for generations. We stand in solidarity with them. We commend the bravery of the local people, the emergency services, the first responders, GPs, those working in the hospitals and the wider health services, and everyone else who was on the ground saving many lives following the tragedy that happened last Friday. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha.

There is a lady in the Public Gallery, Ms Iryna Tekuchova, who is from Ukraine. She is doing a PhD in Maynooth on disability and the impact of disability services in EU accession states. She is also on the expert panel of the Organisation for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which is part of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE. I am on the expert panel as well and it met for the first time in Poland last week. What struck me from my engagement was the serious challenges that people with disabilities are facing in Ukraine. We saw the bombing of Kyiv in the past 48 hours. Let us imagine being a wheelchair user or someone who is blind and the air raid sirens go off. In terms of reaching a shelter or somewhere else that was safe, they would be compromised even before anyone else was.

What concerns me most is the fact that, of the 16 key aid agencies that are rightly getting billions of euro in funding from all over the world, only two have targeted programmes for people with disabilities in Ukraine. That is not good enough. As a country, we need to ensure that all of the key agencies, including the Red Cross, have dedicated programmes for providing financial support on the ground to Ukrainian organisations for persons with disabilities, which are struggling to support people. The horrendous difficulties that persons with disabilities face in a war have regularly been discussed in the Houses.

Some of the work that the panel I am a member of is doing involves examining the impact of emergency responses, particularly as they affect people with disabilities. Perhaps when next we debate Ukraine, we might focus on supports for people with disabilities on the ground and the organisations that support them. This issue is an even greater scandal than the scandal we are dealing with.