Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Seanad Éireann:

acknowledges that: - Ireland has promised to fully ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as per the Programme for Government;

- the National Disability Authority and the Disability Stakeholder Group have recently published reports that show Irish Government Departments are failing to make sufficient progress to meet the minimum requirements for disabled Irish citizens, as set out by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD);

- disability services for children are in failure countrywide, with a crisis in the recruitment and retention of physiotherapists, speech therapists and occupational therapists;

- tens of thousands of Irish children remain on waiting lists, denied the necessary therapeutic interventions within the critical windows of opportunity with their age and development; this delayed, mostly absent, treatment leads to many young people being denied their full potential;

- on Tuesday, 9th May, 2023, the Minister for Finance responded to a question regarding the budget targets by saying that in 2023, his Department was forecasting a general Government surplus of €10 billion; next year the budget surplus is expected to increase to €16.2 billion;

- on average, people with disabilities live with a permanent cost of living crisis; the Department’s own ‘Cost of Disability in Ireland Report’, published in 2021, shows the extra cost in Ireland of being disabled ranges from €9,000 to €11,000;

- this is before a disabled citizen pays rent or tries to feed themselves; the current Disability Allowance is €11,440 a year, and barely meets this additional cost of disability itself;

- over 100,000 disabled citizens live below the poverty line;

- the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Heather Humphreys, proposes to target disabled citizens for ‘medical assessments’ to ‘categorise’ their disability into three levels, each revolving around a ‘capacity to work’;

- on Wednesday, 20th September, 2023, Minister Humphreys met with disability support groups before publishing a Green Paper on Disability Reform, saying the following:

- ‘people who are not able to work will get a higher payment rate. The proposed higher rate is the same as the State Pension Contributory rate which is currently €265.30 a week;

- people in the lowest tier with the highest capacity to work will receive a payment of €220 a week and will be provided supports to find training and employment opportunities suited to their needs;

- people with a more limited capacity to work will be placed in the middle tier and their payment will be half-way between tier 1 and tier 3. They will be offered appropriate employment supports and services.’;

- Ireland is currently the only country in the European Union that does not provide a legal right for a person to access all the supports listed in an assessment of need or equivalent document;

- many people with disabilities nationwide are not getting the supports they are entitled to; therefore, the support people in tier 2 and tier 3 will actually get is not clear; they might even get no support at all; notes that: - the reforms proposed by the Government are similar to the Work Capability Assessment introduced as an UK austerity measure in 2008; the results of that policy were as follows:

- as part of these work-for-benefits schemes, a French company called Atos Healthcare was contracted to assess people to see if they were entitled to disability payments; this was aimed at reducing the number of people receiving benefits;

- multiple deaths were reported to the Department of Work and Pensions; doctors at Atos even said that checks were being done too quickly and that the system was biased towards declaring people fit for work;

- there was a surge in suicide among disabled citizens in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some cancer patients forced to stop treatment to work for benefits; one double-lung and heart transplant patient was deemed fit to work and died nine days later;

- Atos bosses even admitted that 50 per cent of the people they were assessing could end up destitute;

- Whistle-blowers in Atos came forward and GPs united to try and shut down the programme;

- Atos eventually made a £500 million settlement to the Department of Work and Pensions;

- due to the failures of the Work Capability Assessment more broadly, there is discussion within the UK Conservative Party about reforming it;

- this system has been brought thoroughly into disrepute and earlier this year the Westminster Work and Pensions Committee stated that there was a ‘pervasive lack of trust’ in the assessment system;

- funds that could be spent on providing supports for people with disabilities will instead be spent on conducting assessments to see which tier they fall into;

- supports are not being provided to people who can work, such as interpreters in the workplace for members of the deaf community; similarly, supports are not being provided to people on the autism spectrum;

- it is completely inconsistent with the Government’s current, and expensive, PR campaign titled ‘Disability Rights are Human Rights’;

- it is inconsistent with the Programme for Government: Our Shared Future, which states that the Government has ratified the UN Convention on the Right of Persons with Disabilities, which it has not, and that the Government will empower people to choose the supports that most meet their needs;

- it is inconsistent with the UN Convention on the Right of Persons with Disabilities; calls on: - the Minister for Social Protection and other members of Government to:

- immediately stop the proposals listed in the Green Paper on Disability Reform;

- forthwith ensure that the Disability Allowance be made a universal, non-means-tested payment;

- raise the Disability Allowance to the level of the PUP payment to take over 100,000 disabled citizens out of abject poverty;

- ratify all protocols of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities within the lifetime of this Government.