Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Senator McGreehan does not understand. This has nothing to do with the Committee on Disability Matters; it has to do with the people I invited. They are the people who should be front and centre. How ironic, in a discussion about employment for disabled citizens, that this debate is rescheduled to a time when many disabled citizens cannot attend because they are in the workplace or their place of study.For example, my son could not attend this afternoon because he is in Dublin Business School.

It says on page 6 that there will be a public consultation. I would like to know when and where. On pages 16 and 17, it refers to three tiers of payment and an extended table of information refers to the blind pension, disability allowance and invalidity pension. This document, in an administrative desktop exercise, replaces those three payments with a three-tiered approach which, ultimately, as it mirrors the UK system, is designed to save the Exchequer money.

There are even more extraordinary elements to this document that I will elaborate on. On page 21, it sets out an aspiration to move away from a binary approach that a person is either assessed as being capable or incapable of work and instead recognise the continuum of disabilities and the different work capacities of disabled people. Instead of asking people whether they can work, they want to ask disabled citizens how much work they can do. It is an ableist, non-human rights-based approach to the interrogation of disabled citizens as to their capacity to work and sees disabled citizens not as autonomous independent human beings with the right to participate fully, as per Article 19 of the UNCRPD and our Constitution; instead, it reduces them to merely economic units.

It defines disabled persons in three capacities, namely low capacity to work, low to moderate capacity to work or moderate to high capacity to work. How could anyone describe my son in those terms? It is a reductive, instrumental, paternalistic and patronising way to frame the lived experience and reality of life for our disabled citizens.

The document also makes reference to treatments and therapies that will assist disabled Irish citizens to participate in the workplace. Those therapies, treatments, interventions and surgeries do not exist within the therapeutic and developmental window. That is a fact, which is completely and utterly ignored and misrepresented in this document.

The section defining, assessing and assigning is the most extraordinary of the document. It proposes that all disabled citizens be subjected to a medical assessment, carried out by the medical review and assessment service, MRAS. I cannot bring myself to read what the document states on page 33. It is proposed that if the new tiered structure is adopted existing claimants, which is how the document describes disabled citizens receipt of disability allowance, will be moved over to the new payment over time and that a programme of reviews will be put in place for these recipients, that is, these citizens. This is the Victorian mobilisation of language, which sees disabled people as recipients or claimants, like the deserving or deserving poor. It is the language of Charles Dickens.

The document goes on to state that the programme of review will take five years to implement. By that logic, it means that, given that there are 225,000 disabled citizens, 1,000 would have to be medically assessed every week, non-stop, for 52 weeks of the year for five years to achieve that. These are individuals like my son who cannot get medical appointments as we speak. My son cannot get speech therapy, yet the Government proposes to have him medically assessed to see if he is fit to work.

Would the Minister like it if somebody called to her house and asked her to come out so they could have a look at her and decide whether she was medically fit to work? They might perhaps tell Senator Boylan she could do a little bit more physical labour. It is the most extraordinary set of proposals and flies in the face of the aspirations for the fundamental human rights of disabled citizens, as set out in the UNCRPD.

How would the Government carry out or pay for 1,000 medical assessments per week? In the UK, the Tories contracted this out to their pals in the private health sector, who carry them out and make huge profits. It is a recurring feature of those assessments that they last between 20 minutes and an hour. I think of all of the medical interventions and medical files on my son, which would need to be carried in a trolley. That some disinterested medic who does not know him would make a decision about his life on the basis of a 20-minute or one-hour assessment is wrong.

I again ask how the Government will conduct 1,000 of these assessments every week, 52 weeks of the year, over five years? Not only that, the document states that after two years, people will face a second review if their condition is not deemed to be permanent. Two years into the five-year system, the number of medical assessments per week will increase from 1,000 to as high as 1,250 or 1,300. It beggars belief that, at a time we have insufficient medical resources to meet the needs of people, the Government would propose to assess people on their capacity to work. This is in the context of everything that I have set out on previous occasions.

By accident or design - I hope it is by accident, although I have my doubts - the proposed three-tier system matches almost precisely the work capability assessment of disabled citizens introduced in the UK in 2008 as an austerity measure, and which is much beloved by the Tories. It has led to a surge of suicides among disabled citizens in the UK, to the extent that last year the BBC in Northern Ireland had a special focus on the surge in suicide among disabled citizens. The work and pensions committee of the House of Commons, dominated by the Tories, stated this year that there was a pervasive lack of trust in the system. We should not go down this road. I am not accusing anybody here of being a Tory or assuming that. I am certain that the people who drafted this document, flawed and all as it is, probably did so in utmost good faith.