Madam, - The prospect of a rights-based Disability Bill seems to be receding by the day. With the banners for the Special Olympics carefully packed away, and with Nelson Mandela safely out of earshot, Willie O'Dea summoned up the courage to stick out his chest and proclaim his belief that the right of people with disabilities to services should be limited by the "availability of staff and resources".
Buoyed up by a sense of his own temerity, he then attempted to impugn the integrity of a man who has worked with selfless and self-effacing manner on behalf of the disability sector in this country for over 30 years. His attack on Fergus Finlay was beneath contempt and hardly merits another mention but for the fact that it demonstrates the increasingly shrill determination of this Government to distract attention from its commitment to resources over rights.
Michael McDowell has described the new Disability Bill as "modern, innovative and radical", but crocodile tears over the amount of money expended on litigation that could otherwise have been spent on services - from the man who, as Attorney-General, urged the then Government to appeal the High Court decision in the Sinnott case - will fool no-one.
This fearless champion of the privileged remains ideologically incapable of acknowledging the simple fact that the provision of adequate services in the first instance would negate the need for recourse to the courts.
Given his distaste for the spectacle of ordinary, tax-paying citizens seeking redress of their grievances against the State through the courts, the circuitous route alluded to by the Minister at a recent conference in Dublin will doubtless be strewn with pitfalls designed to thwart the desire of parents to secure their children's basic rights.
Now that Ms Kennedy-Shriver is safely gone, the Taoiseach has rowed back on his prior commitment to rights-based legislation. Responding to a letter from Pat Rabbitte, Mr Ahern resorted to his trademark gibberish in a vain effort to obscure the moral vacuity that has characterised his tenure as Taoiseach.
His puerile attempt to displace the importance of a rights-based approach onto an abstract, conceptual plane is an insult to the concrete realities faced by the many people who have learned from bitter experience that the only way to ensure that this Government faces up to its responsibilities in the disability sector is to take, or threaten, legal action.
The truly appalling state of services for people with disabilities in this country suggests that anything short of a rights-based bill will merely be a charter for a continued neglect. - Yours, etc.,
BRENDAN BUNBURY,
Limekiln Drive,
Dublin 12.