‘Please help us’

THE people who take to the streets of Dublin today as part of a protest march outside Leinster House are not doing so because they are angry at the banks, NAMA or greedy developers.

This protest is simply about attracting attention to the plight of intellectually disabled people.

The protesters – fathers mothers, brothers, sisters and friends – are angry about the way they feel essential services for disabled people are being callously cut back, seemingly without regard for the lives of the most vulnerable. Today they will march to Leinster House to defend the rights of people who have no voice.

Inclusion Ireland, which has organised today’s march, maintains the disability strategy as laid out in 2004 has been decimated.

They say people with disabilities have faced cut after cut and this march is about telling the Government enough is enough.

Noreen Noone, the mother of seriously disabled 22-year-old Orla Noone, will be one of the marchers.

She has written to the Minister for Health on her daughter’s behalf and today we print a letter she believes Orla would write, if she was able to do so.