Yesterday's report on the barriers which society puts in front of disabled people represents a significant advance for the disability movement. It can take much of the credit for the establishment of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities in 1993. Deliberately structured so as to put people personally affected by disability in control, the commission travelled the State to hear what its constituency had to say.
It said the greatest handicaps facing people with disabilities are those imposed by society: public transport they cannot use, buildings they cannot get into, officials who send them from pillar to post, the denial of education, training and jobs and a myriad of other barriers. Faced with demands for at least two decades to remove these barriers, the wider society has chosen, by and large, not to bother. Hence the importance of the commission's recommendation for a constitutional amendment to enshrine a right to equality and to prohibit discrimination.
In a society shot through with barriers to disabled people - made up more often of apathy, insolence and ignorance than of hostility - a constitutional amendment would provide the disability movement with a powerful weapon with which to attack those barriers. Even in the absence of a constitutional amendment, a Disabilities Act, as recommended by the commission, could do much to tackle the pervasive discrimination which is the lot of those with disabilities.
The commission estimates that as many as 360,000 people in the Republic have a disability. It is clear, therefore, that a significant segment of the population will be affected by whether the commission's proposals are implemented. In addition, of course, many who today see disabled people as a class apart will one day - perhaps soon - join their ranks. Others will become the parents of children with disabilities. The improvements sought by the commission will, therefore, have a very wide application indeed as time goes on. What is less often recognised is that improved services for people with disabilities mean improved services for everyone.
The gulf between the aspiration and the reality may be huge, but it is there and can be tapped for support by the disability movement. Perhaps one of the most powerful effects of the work of the commission will be that people may begin to see themselves, not as persons with individual disabilities, but as members of a disability movement. That, in turn, would put real clout behind disability issues at election time and would bring about progress at a speed which we have not seen in this area before.
But clout will also come from the Council for the Status of People with Disabilities, a permanent, official body which begins work in January. Again, it will be dominated by persons directly affected by disability - elections to the council are already well under way. For that very reason it can be expected to make a very big difference and is greatly to be welcomed. It must also be acknowledged that the Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mr Taylor, has created a supportive environment for the commission, and for the forthcoming council, in his Department.
Nowadays, departments are chopped and changed with abandon after elections. The Department for Equality and Law Reform has an exceptionally strong case for having the primary responsibility for disability issues. It would be a tragedy if this Department were to disappear in the horse trading after the next general election. The wish, expressed by the commission, that the Department's future be protected should be heeded when the time comes.
WRITE something nice about the Serbs. That was the message we heard over and over again while acting as OSCE supervisors for elections in Bosnia Herzegovina. As soon as people found out that some of us were journalists, they almost pleaded with us to tell the world that the Serbs were kind, gentle, civilised people and not the blood thirsty mass murderers made out by the media.
We were based in Srbac, a pleasant market town about an hour's drive north of Banja Luka. Srbac (pronounced Serbats) had entirely escaped the ravages of war because the mayor made an agreement with his opposite number in Davor, just across the Sava River in Croatia, that neither of them would get involved in the war - and so both towns were spared the carnage and destruction which took place' elsewhere.
Extremely Hospitable
Everywhere we went, people were friendly and extremely hospitable. On election day we had no less than three invitations to roast pig lunches from presiding officers in our area. A week earlier, one of them had entertained us to an impromptu lunch at home, his wife producing a table laden with hard and soft cheeses, ham, speck, fresh eggs and corn bread - all of it from their own small farm. I had to tell them that if they dropped into an Irish farmhouse, everything on the table was likely to be from the nearest supermarket.
Self sufficiency survives in Repubika Srpska, the Serb controlled part of Bosnia. Farmers still make hay, rather than sillage, and their artfully constructed haystacks are one of the most memorable features of the rolling countryside in the Srbac area. Free range chickens, ducks, geese and pigs can be seen almost everywhere, even among the suburban houses lining the roads outside the town. All of this, as well as growing their own vegetables (including the most delicious tomatoes I have ever tasted), helped the Serbs to cope with the privations of the past five years.
For two of us sharing a flat on the ground floor of an unfinished house, it took time to get used to the sound of multiple cockcrows long before dawn every day. But Mira Kovacevic, our landlady, could not have been kinder. Knowing of the addiction to hot water of northern Europeans, she had a boiler installed in the bathroom on the day we moved in, though she was only charging each of us 15 DM (about £6) a night. She also did our washing, ironed our clothes and made pots of Turkish coffee while her husband, Bogdan, served shotglasses of slivovich.
More properly known as rakia, this is the legendary plum brandy of the Balkans - and it, too, is domestically produced. Nearly every house has at least - 20 plum trees from which the fruit is harvested in September.
Left to ferment in wooden vats, it is eventually distilled in a fairly crude looking contraption, like the one we came across - in full production - by the side of a dirt road near the tiny village of Razboj Zupski. When I told the distillers that in Ireland they would all be arrested, their hooch confiscated and the equipment broken up, they shook their heads incredulously at our way of doing things.
Communal Hatred
Still, it is quite impossible to separate any of the Serbs we met - or, indeed, anyone else in Bosnia - from the atrocities of the war which has ruined their country. Had they been as kind to each other as they were to us, it would not have happened. But the communal hatred which consumed Bosnia is starkly evident in the ruined houses which litter the countryside and in devastated towns such as Derventa, where a heap of reinforced concrete is all that is left of the Catholic church and a weed infested site on the main square is where the mosque once stood.
Inevitably, we were asked what we thought of it all. My response, repeated in answer to the same question many times, was that what happened was a tragedy for everyone - Serbs, Croats and Muslims. After all, Bosnia is a country where half of the entire population is now displaced. People on all sides are still numbed by what has happened, most of them are living on half nothing, and the country is so divided by its meandering "inter entity boundary line" that you cannot even make a telephone call from one side to the other.
Inevitably, too, we were asked who we thought was to blame. The Serbs were always pleased when I would apportion at least part of the blame to Germany for its precipitate - some would say reckless - recognition of Croatia in 1992. At one of the numerous OSCE briefings, a Mexican born human rights monitor told us that there were no good guys and bad guys in Bosnia, "just bad guys and bad guys". Twenty years ago, a sophisticated Serb woman now living in Geneva said: "Nobody ever thought it would come to this". Yet it did.
Uneasy Feeling
I left with an uneasy feeling that we had served as willing dupes of the "international community", presiding over elections which merely legitimised the partitioning of Bosnia. Arriving home to find the Northern Ireland talks still deadlocked and the loyalist ceasefire teetering on the brink, it began to feel that everyone involved in the "peace process" here should be put on a charter flight to Sarajevo and taken on a tour of war ravaged Bosnia, so that they could see for themselves what happens when the worst comes to the worst.
In the meantime, the Irish Red Cross has sent out the first truck in a convoy to carry clothes and other essential supplies to Banja Luka, before the onset of what is expected to be a long and severe winter. Raising funds to help the needy in Republika Srpska may not be very fashionable, but the truth is that ordinary Serbs have suffered along with everyone else in the Bosnian conflict, and the Red Cross effort deserves support.