We must not allow disabled people fall victim to our litigious society

THE Special Olympics have certainly highlighted the plight of people with mental disabilities. Some of them have been the most articulate spokespeople for their own cause.

Caitriona Ryan, the young woman who called out the Olympic oath at the opening ceremony, made a particularly poignant appeal on RTÉ's lunchtime news during the week.

"Before I joined the Special Olympics I wasn't able to stand up for myself because I had special needs and I was bullied quite a lot in school because I had special needs," she explained. "I have so many scars from when I was bullied."

She obviously felt excluded by schoolmates who acted as if her difficulties might be contagious. She explained that she had to have special help to learn to talk, to walk and to swim. She would like to do coaching or lifeguarding but is being denied the opportunity because places feel unable to take her on for insurance reasons.

"I think that is very bad," Caitriona said. "People with special needs are just the same as you, just that they may be a little bit slower, but we can do things that you might not be able to do." One thing is absolutely certain: we can all learn from that young woman.

No doubt all handicapped people suffer from the insensitivity of boorish and ignorant people. If it was only to highlight the fact that people with mental disabilities are still people of intelligence and feelings who can learn even though they may be a bit slow, the whole Special Olympics experience will have been enormously worthwhile.

But these Games have also been a reminder of sport at its purest.

On Monday, The Irish Examiner published Fergus and Frieda Finlay's moving account of the trials, tribulations and the joys of having a mentally handicapped child. Of course, people don't normally talk about the joys of having such a child, but despite all the pain caused by the uncertainty of their future, they have an enormous capacity for love.

People have been campaigning for years to have the rights of people with disabilities defined in law. Many of them are indignant at the attitude adopted by the Taoiseach on RTÉ's Prime Time last week. He was not as clear as he should have been, but, in fairness, he was not advocating that the rights of such people should not be defined, as some people have been suggesting. "I would not see it as an achievement to give disabled people in this country a rights bill approach so that the only way they will get their services is to go to the High Court," the Taoiseach said.

"What I would rather do is give them their service." He showed his concern with his strong backing of the Special Olympics project.

What he probably meant to say was that the government should put in place a system that would ensure that such people's needs were met rather than just declaring those rights and allowing legal vultures to use litigation to eat up resources that could be used for the handicapped. We have been developing into a litigation society. There was a time when people would first look for a doctor, a priest or a garda in the event of an accident or emergency. Now they look for a lawyer if one hasn't already turned up out of the blue.

Fergus Finlay made an eminently sensible suggestion in his column here during the week, when he proposed that a person with the moral authority of an ombudsman should be appointed to investigate, adjudicate and, if necessary, take legal action to ensure that people with disabilities are accorded a right to a proper assessment of their needs and access to the specific agencies to fulfil those needs.

Both Tim O'Malley, the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell welcomed the suggestion and acknowledged that they were essentially in agreement with the proposal. The Minister for Justice went on to ruffle a few feathers when he rather insensitively emphasised the need to avoid feeding our litigation culture.

The minister is clearly irritated that people seem to want to hold society responsible for what has been going wrong, rather than put the responsibility where it belongs.

"Personal responsibility is something we have surrendered to a view of the world that implies an individual is owed a duty by somebody else," he argued. He insists that people should take "responsibility, rather than expecting that there is something owed them".

In just about every other walk of life there would be a great deal of validity to what he was saying, but he chose the wrong issue when he was talking about people with disabilities. Was he saying that people with disabilities should stop whining and do something for themselves?

That was what he seemed to be suggesting, but he was riding his hobbyhorse on the wrong issue and at the wrong time. While complaining about the culture of litigation in which people are blaming everybody else, he noted that millions of euro have been spent in recent years by the Department of Education on legal fees to fight cases being brought by people seeking what they believed were their rights. The Jamie Sinnott case is an unfortunate example. The State actually won that case, but it was a pyrrhic victory. After the High Court ruled that the State should provide Jamie Sinnott then in his early 20s and suffering from autism with continuing education as long as it was beneficial to him, the Government appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which overturned it on the grounds that the Constitution only requires the state to provide an education for children, not for adults.

Successive governments evaded their responsibility to provide for the needs of people with disabilities, and the tragedy was that Jamie's mother was forced to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, because of Government insensitivity.

Money wasted on that litigation would have been much better spent on people suffering from autism, but that was the Government's fault.

It squandered a fortune in establishing a cruel legal precedent instead of providing needed help. If there were a foot-in-mouth award, Michael McDowell would definitely have won it feet up, having produced a gold medal performance this week. Of course, he is under enormous pressure.

The bulk of his cabinet colleagues would gladly gut and fillet him. He has a great knack of getting up the nose of Fianna Fáilers from the cabinet to the backbenches. Let's be fair, he was right to complain about the cost of the litigation.

We have the absurdity of legal fees of up to 2,500 a day being paid to lawyers at the tribunals. Nine lawyers at the Flood Tribunal have already been paid almost 18 million between them. They have been investigating criminal matters that should have been investigated by the gardaí, but they are in such a mess that they are currently the subject of two tribunals themselves.

One would be tempted to ask how they got into such a mess, but we would probably need another tribunal to get the answer. Let's face it, we've all been slow learners.