Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I, too, salute Senator Ahearn, the Acting Chairman, on what is a nice, well deserved day for him.

I echo the remarks of those who thanked all the staff and Members across the House. It is only the people you become friends with. I would consider myself to be a friend of probably everybody here in one way or another. Everyone who is here is here because they are motivated by public service, doing the right thing and decency. I hope everybody here who has put himself or herself forward for election will be successful because we have had a great Seanad. I intend to be back here. If I am not, it will not be by choice. I have every intention of coming back.

I thank my own team, including Edel and Breege, whom the Senators all know, and indeed Cat from New York, who is in the Public Gallery and who has been a great asset to my team over the past couple of months. We have to acknowledge and appreciate the people in our teams. They are part of a community that facilitates us in doing what we do. It has been a great privilege for the past 13.5 years to be a representative of the blind and visually impaired. They did not have a voice in the Houses of the Oireachtas until I got elected. While representing them is not the work I do exclusively – far from it; I speak on many issues – I always speak for them regularly, call out things when I believe they need to be called out, and look for resources when I believe they are needed. I thank Vision Ireland for its nomination and also for nominating me for the next Seanad. We will see how that goes.

I have had the privilege of chairing an international expert panel on the participation of persons with disabilities in public life. It is hard to believe that less than 0.1% of the parliamentary population of the world is made up of people with disabilities. In the European Parliament, which has nearly 700 Members, only three have declared a disability. There are many countries whose parliaments have nobody with a declared disability representing them, even though many have list systems and there is really no excuse. I look forward to continuing my work internationally with OSCE ODIHR.

Sometimes something happens that really makes us wonder what we have achieved. I was speaking to a person yesterday whose daughter is visually impaired. The daughter went to a maths grind with 200 people and was ridiculed for 20 minutes because the tutor delivering the course could not understand how she could do the work because of the fact that she was blind. I had really believed that, as a society, we had moved on regarding how we treat young people with disabilities. The only way we can prevent something like what I have described from happening is by introducing laws. Whoever among us are Members of the next Oireachtas need to introduce laws to protect young people from humiliation of the kind that happened to the young person in question in the past couple of weeks.

With that, I wish everybody the very best of luck over the next three or four weeks and, indeed, in the next 90 days, because it will be stressful. It will be difficult not only for us but also for our families. I hope people will be successful.