Fergus Finlay: People with disabilities battling against a cruel and mad system
We have fought campaigns throughout my lifetime for the rights of all sorts of other people and groups, mainly on the basis of seeking to end discrimination. But discrimination against people with disabilities remains legal.
Last week the independent Senator Tom Clonan wrote a powerful article here about people with disabilities. The headline on his piece, based on a phrase he used, was “Disability rights are in freefall”. I utterly agree with the points he was making, except I need to ask one question. What rights?
A fierce clever lawyer once told me that people with a disability in Ireland have exactly the same rights as everyone else — the right to own property, the right to free speech, equal access before the law — that kind of thing. It was the sort of specious nonsense that would make you want to hit someone. People with a disability in Ireland, uniquely among the rest of the population, have no effective rights whatsoever.
An appalling piece of legislation from 2005 — one of the worst ever passed by the Oireachtas — gave them the right to an assessment of their needs, but no right whatsoever to anything that flowed from that assessment. Earlier equality legislation was supposed to protect them from discrimination at work, alongside other minority groups, but the Supreme Court decided that people with disabilities had to be excluded from that protection if it involved employers at any expense. They have a constitutional right to an education, but the Supreme Court also decided that for them — for nobody else, only for people with disabilities — that right disappears on their eighteenth birthdays.
So it’s okay to ignore people with disabilities. We have fought campaigns throughout my lifetime for the rights of all sorts of other people and groups, mainly on the basis of seeking to end discrimination. But discrimination against people with disabilities remains legal. It’s ok.
And now the government has decided to add insult to injury. They’ve had a bright idea, and it’s all set out in a Green Paper they’ve just published. It’s not enough to discriminate against people with a disability. We’re now going to start discriminating between people with a disability. We’re going to create different classes of people with disabilities — tiers, we’re going to call them — and we’re going to treat each tier differently.
The first media reports I saw about this suggested that what the government was concerned about was the fact that people with different disabilities have different levels of need. But when you read the paper they produced, it’s clear that what they’re really bothered about is the fact that some people with a disability might be able to do a bit of work.
They’re clearly the ones who need to be shaken out of their complacency — imagine, all those work-shy people with their sensory or intellectual disabilities, their anxiety or stress, their crutches or their wheelchairs. Let’s get them medically assessed and force them to turn up at their local employment office and take whatever bit of part-time or full-time work might be available.
Of course, there might be a few that will never be able to work. Let’s leave them alone — in fact, let’s give them a few extra bob. That’ll teach the others. Who do they think they are anyway?
Of course, that’s not the language of the Green Paper. It talks about the deprivation endured by people with disabilities, and it acknowledges the fact that people with disabilities are nine times more likely to suffer consistent poverty than people without disabilities. But it then creates this weird system of discrimination between different levels of disability and creates the opportunity to begin to coerce some laggards with a disability.
There is — there was? Maybe still is, who knows? — a thing called the Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities. It was published by the then government in 2015 and is supposed to “be completed” in 2024. It was all about enabling, and taking down barriers, and changing systems to make them friendlier.
And it was hugely welcomed by people with disabilities. Because — believe it or not — those who can work want to work. They can’t all sustain high-pressure full-time jobs and they don’t all want careers, but if you give people with a disability a chance to do a job that’s fulfilling, that matches their capacities, and that enables them to make a contribution, they’ll queue up. You don’t have to force them at all.
To make that strategy work, an implementation committee of civil servants and people from the sector was put in place. That committee needed an independent chair. The government asked me to do that job.
And I did it, to the best of my ability, for (I think) seven years. I put a huge amount of time and effort into it, and I like to think we made some progress. I could write a book about who contributed and who didn’t, but the system did begin to adapt. The social welfare code was changed, a statutory target for employment in the public sector was introduced, and many government departments began to implement their pieces of the jigsaw better. A lot of decent public servants did good stuff. They were doing their day jobs, but they were also stretching.
And then it hit a brick wall. I resigned from that job earlier this year when it became clear that the reasonable innovations that were necessary were simply never going to happen. I hadn’t intended even to make my resignation public, because I thought the ministers I worked with had their hearts in the right place, and that the civil servants I worked alongside were overwhelmed but genuinely trying.
I still think that. But the system hasn’t moved on. This Green Paper proves that. In the letter I sent to the Department telling them I couldn’t do it anymore, I said, “For most of my adult life (and most of my political life indeed) I have been convinced that when all is said and done, people who live in Ireland with a disability always find themselves on the bottom of the political priority list. The Comprehensive Employment Strategy was a chance to change that in one respect at least ... It now needs someone with political clout and determination to insist that these approaches start to become part of the mainstream public service.”
It would take me a lot of space to explain why, uniquely, people with disabilities are simply not seen as people who deserve rights, and as people carrying burdens the rest of us don’t have to deal with. Having failed to do the things that need to be done to give people with a disability some real choices, the system has decided to start down the road of medicalising them again and coercing those they think should be coerced.
At the end of the day, here’s what you can do to stop this cruel and mad approach. The disability activist Margaret Kennedy (interest declared — she and her sister Ann are friends of mine) has a petition on Change.org. It’s growing every day. Go there. Find it. Sign it. Stand for, and alongside, people with disabilities. Tell the government where to get off.
