Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yes, with Senator Craughwell. I will do 12 or 13 minutes and he will take up the balance.

I thank the Minister for coming here. It is very much appreciated. I want to talk about the Green Paper on disability reform. I have it here with me and I have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb. It is an extraordinary document. I want to give the context in which it has been published. Ireland is an outlier when it comes to disability rights. Ireland is an outlier when it comes to every single outcome for disabled citizens. Suboptimal medical outcomes, isolation, poverty, homelessness - we are one of the worst jurisdictions in the European Union in which to have a disability on every measure. We have been shouting this from the rooftops at every meeting of the Committee on Disability Matters and every meeting with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth as regards disability matters. The disabled persons organisations, DPOs, have been very vocal on all these points. We are all aware of the plight of children and young adults who face delayed operations for scoliosis in Temple Street and Crumlin hospitals and who have extreme complications as a consequence of those delays. That is emblematic of the situation that confronts disabled citizens in Ireland. It is in that context that this document is published.

I will foreground it by saying that the chief executive of the HSE has acknowledged that Progressing Disability Services for Children and Young People has failed. Disabled citizens cannot get appointments with medical practitioners for physiotherapy, occupational therapy, treatments or interventions. They are chronically delayed beyond the therapeutic window and beyond their developmental windows. Hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of children and young adults and their families cannot get medical treatment, cannot get medical appointments and cannot get even assessments of need. It is in that context that this Green Paper proposes to medically assess a quarter of a million disabled citizens on the basis of their capacity to work. This is a very misguided proposal.

I will go through the document. It is a proposal document. On the first page it sets out what the proposal is, and it is one proposal and one only: "a tiered income support system would replace the current flat system." That is it. There is no other proposal in the document. To my mind - and I am an academic, a researcher and a journalist who has been publishing and analysing for the past 25 years - it is a statement of intent.

The Minister's foreword acknowledges two very important things on page 2. It acknowledges the poverty that confronts most disabled citizens. One hundred thousand fit the definition of living in poverty, with 20% of disabled citizens living in constant and abject poverty. The way to get them out of that poverty is to make disability allowance a universal, non-means-tested payment. As the Minister herself rightly identifies, her own Department's cost-of-disability study identified an additional extra cost to disabled citizens of €9,000. The Indecon report, which was commissioned in 2019, not in 2020, and published in 2021, indicated that the additional cost was between €9,000 and €16,000. We appreciate the modest increase in the disability allowance in the budget yesterday. Disability allowance, prior to the increase yesterday, amounts to about €11,440 per annum, so it does not quite meet the requirements of the extra costs imposed as ascertained by the Department's own commissioned studies and the studies from within the Minister's own Department. That is another reason carrying out medical assessments of 225,000 people will make no material difference to their personal circumstances but will in many cases place them on a tiered payment, which will be less than the minimum required to take them out of that poverty. The minimum amount identified by the DPOs is the €350-per-week pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, which the Government by its own estimation felt was the minimum required for people to survive on or just above the poverty line.

On page 6 of the document it states that there will be a public consultation. The public consultation closes on 15 December. When and where will this public consultation take place? We have nine weeks to go. Disabled people as a community have to make extensive arrangements and planning to attend meetings. For example, it was originally scheduled to hold this debate later in the evening, and at short notice the time for it was brought forward to 2.30 p.m. Many of the guests I invited, disabled persons, are unable to attend at this time because it is during the working day and when many of them have access to carers and personal assistants. They will not be able to come-----