Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her response. This is not an attempt to close down the conversation. It is the beginning of opening that conversation and having it in the clear light of day.

I want to address a point the Minister made. She said that, based on current CSO figures, giving everybody with a disability a weekly universal payment of €350 would cost €18 billion a year. That was never suggested by me or anyone else. What we are suggesting is that people in receipt of disability allowance receive that as a universal payment. That would cost €78.7 million, not €18 billion. In fact, when one takes away the current cost of €49.5 million, it would actually mean an extra cost of just €29 million. That is all, not €18 billion. I wanted to clarify that.

The other matters I wanted to refer to were the comments on the document itself. The Minister said the document does not claim to present the only way or the best way to deal with reform of the disability payments. In actual fact, when one analyses the document, that is precisely what it does. It provides only one solution. The main assumptions of the document and the language used in it are highly prescriptive, highly reductive and highly mechanistic. It is, in fact, a de facto blueprint for a system that, as I said earlier, either by accident or design, is a photocopy of what was introduced as an austerity measure in the United Kingdom in 2008. That system has been brought thoroughly into disrepute.

With regard to the Minister's remarks about the medical assessments, let me be very clear. I am quoting the Minister's document, and under the headings in pages 28 to 34, which refer to defining, assessing and assigning, it sets out very explicitly throughout, and with a concluding quote, that over five years, all 225,000 current recipients of disability allowance will be medically assessed. Let me repeat: that would mean that at least 1,000 disabled citizens would have to be medically examined or assessed every week, 52 weeks of the year, for five years. Given the Minister's statement in the document that the Department would review many of these cases after two years, that number is likely to increase. I heard nothing in the responses from the Government that would address that issue.I mean that in the context of a population of citizens who cannot get access to an assessment of need or to any of the therapies, supports or interventions contained in such an assessment of need. Let us be very clear: the document and what it proposes - and we are discussing it right now - will do nothing for people like my son or my guests here today. It will submit them to a medical assessment they do not want to undertake. They have already been assessed and diagnosed. That is why they are in receipt of disability allowance. I ask that the Minister not persist with this. I can tell her what its legacy will be. If she thinks a proposal to put tax on children's shoes was politically unwise, I can tell her that the disabled persons organisations are incandescent about what is contained in this document. I know because I am in contact with them every day.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities mandates carers and parents to advocate on the part of their family members and children. I do not come in here as an interested party. I do not come in here as someone with lived experience of disability, although I do, but that is not the capacity in which I am here. I am here because I am mandated to do this by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and I ask the Minister to urge her Cabinet colleagues to do what was set out in the programme for Government and fully ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities with all its protocols in the lifetime of this Government.

I never advocated for a universal payment of €350 for all persons with a disability. My proposal is that all persons in receipt of disability allowance would get a standard, universal, non-means tested payment. That is the alternative that should be contained in a document like this. Not a singular, one domain assumption set of prescriptions for rubber stamping.