The Special Olympics will focus much-needed attention on the State'sdismal record of neglect of the disabled here, writes Donal Toolan.
As the Special Olympics are set to bring an international media circus to Ireland, it is inevitable that our treatment of the rights of disabled people will come under some scrutiny.
So what might our international guests expect to find underneath what many hope will be a continued interest and support by corporate Ireland and hundreds of communities throughout the country? Will our law-makers seek to share the feeling with the odd photo opportunity?
To guide our international guests as they celebrate the achievement of each contestant they might also ask the smiling Irish law-makers in the frame about their record to date.
The Government has decided to postpone introducing its Disabilities Bill until the autumn schedule, at least. We are getting to see the Education Disadvantage Bill before the summer recess, which will attempt to address areas within education for disabled students - but why leave the Disabilities Bill? Don't our legislators want to share their feeling about this Bill?
An earlier attempt at this legislation was withdrawn two months before last year's general election for further consultation. It is important to realise that the failed Disabilities Bill 2002 was not just a recent discussion point. Introducing the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities in 1993, the then government talked about introducing legislation which would be trail-blazing and be the envy of our European neighbours.
A decade later, the disability-specific legislation, containing enforceable rights, called for in the report of the commission under the chairmanship of Mr Justice Feargus Flood has yet to surface.
Another recommendation called for needs-based assessments: disabled people sitting down with a support service to determine what their needs are and a plan arrived at as to how those needs might be met. This would mean placing disabled people and their families at the centre of services as opposed to policy being determined by a diversity of different services; it would mean people getting what they need, as opposed to that frequently inappropriately offered, such as locating a young disabled person in a county home or a nursing home for older people with dementia.
Needs-based assessments require greater co-ordination and planning of services, ensuring for instance people getting employment from the education or training they are receiving. A decade after the commission's report, no such needs assessment process exists and we have developed no formal model of personal assistance driven by such needs.
The commission also called for independent advocacy systems, mindful of the experience of disabled people who live in closed spaces. Such closed spaces include residential facilities, training centres and other spaces used or lived in by disabled people and not accessed by the rest of the population.
Earlier this year we learned that one service provider felt a necessity to use restraining equipment on some people living in these spaces because of a shortage of resources.
Failure to deliver needs-based assessments and independent advocacy systems means that much of our newly developed physical infrastructure remains inaccessible to so many disabled people. As a result, they and their families demand, through the Disability Legislation Consultation Group (DLCG), that whatever legislation comes forward must ultimately be judiciable - namely enforceable through the courts.
The DLCG met Minister of State Mr Willie O'Dea yesterday and sought to determine, in anticipation of any Special Olympics festivities, the substance of the Government's proposed disabilities legislation. Specifically, we need to know if the rights provided in any legislation will ultimately be enforceable.
The very word "rights" seems to send some Ministers into near hysteria, such is their disdain for what they call "human rights speak".
We are told that the provision of enforceable social and economic rights would disturb the sacred separation of executive and judicial powers. This is the same executive that has played word games over who is responsible for responding to the needs of disabled people.
Rights-based legislation does not mean, as has been suggested, that everyone will be clogging up the courts to ensure they get a particular service. Access to such redress would happen only after every other mechanism of complaint failed, but would also act to concentrate and formalise the planning of services.
How much would socio-economic rights cost, we are also asked. And yet does the Government know how much it currently spends on disability? My efforts to find such a figure from the National Disability Authority have met a blank wall. We do know some of the outcomes: an unemployment rate of 70 per cent among disabled people can't merely be the fault of employers, it might also relate to the value of the indefinite training paid for out of European Structural Funds. Or, perhaps, to the value of the education offered those attending special education in equipping people not only to access employment but to live with a modicum of independence to exercise basic choices.
Like the majority of people on this island who voted for the Belfast Agreement in 1998, with the concept of human rights at its centre, I find it increasingly worrying that the utterances against a rights-based approach appear to go unchallenged, particularly when the same voices are those charged with managing that agreement.
Members of the Government label people involved in the promotion of human rights as unreconstructed Marxists or socialists simply because we don't believe it tolerable in a republic that people should have to crawl on to buses, or be confined in closed spaces without autonomy or dignity in exercising basic choices as to when or what they eat, or not be afforded the dignity of some privacy in our own homes.
I would rather see those representatives not treat the Belfast Agreement with careless abandon: an agreement which requires unequivocal rights standards for all on this island. I would like them to deliver on the report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities as established by the political process, which they seem so protective of.
I would also rather not see their faces milking photo opportunities from disabled people over the coming weeks until they, as law-makers, share their feelings on how my rights as a disabled person might be given meaningful effect in our statute books.
Donal Toolan is a member of the Disability Legislation Consultation Group. He is on the executive of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and is a contributor to Disability and Social Policy in Ireland, from UCD Press, to be launched on June 19th.