Who’s the real fool in the endless struggle to win disability rights?

I WAS trying to figure out why Taoiseach Brian Cowen called Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny a fool for trying to raise the crisis facing thousands of people with an intellectual disability. Was it because the Taoiseach really believes there is no such crisis?

Was it because Enda Kenny described the crisis in some inappropriate way? Or was it because the Taoiseach was just in a grumpy mood? I haven’t been able to track down the exact moment the Taoiseach said Enda Kenny was a fool. I know it was said in the Dáil last Wednesday during a debate on disability issues because that has been widely reported. One political correspondent, who has a high reputation for accuracy, has written that it was at 10.42 last Wednesday morning — that would be about 10 minutes into the discussion.

And in that 10 minutes, the Taoiseach had said about 10 times no decision had been made to cut services for people with intellectual disabilities. Perhaps he thought Enda Kenny was a fool because he didn’t just accept his word on the matter.

The word “fool” doesn’t actually appear on the record of the Dáil at all for that day (or any other day for that matter — you can search the entire Oireachtas website without finding it – it’s obviously in insult they don’t like to record). But the remark was made, there’s no doubt about that.

The odd thing was, while I was searching the Dáil record for the Taoiseach’s reference to Enda Kenny as a fool, what did I come across only a reference by the Taoiseach to my good self.

To my surprise, in the course of stoutly defending his own record in the disability area, he referred to the fact that disability services were in “an appalling state”, as he put it, when they (I presume he meant Fianna Fáil) came into office. And, said he, “then there was the era when Fergus Finlay was the second most powerful man in the government”.

He didn’t alas, elaborate. So I’m not 100% sure what he was referring to, although his colleague Dermot Ahern said that was 1994-1997. Lest I should be allowed to get a swelled head over the matter, it appears to be the Taoiseach’s view that there was some point at which I was allowed to have a disproportionate influence, and didn’t use that influence on behalf of people with a disability.

He may well be right in some ways. I was never the second most powerful man in an Irish government, nor anywhere near it. And I never had the luxury of working for a government that was flush with cash either. But I did work for a party that, way back in 1992, promised to make the largest additional investment ever made in disability services, if it was elected to government. After the 1992 election, I was one of a number of people who negotiated a programme for government with Fianna Fáil. It has been well documented that one of our failures in those negotiations was that, try as we might, (and it looked like a deal-breaker for a while) we could not persuade our Fianna Fáil counterparts (who included Brian Cowen) to put a specific amount of money into the programme for disability services. There was strong language in the programme all right, but no money.

But two other things happened as a result of those negotiations. The first was that Brendan Howlin became Minister for Health and, within a year, he had honoured Labour’s disability commitments in full. The £25 million of new spending in essential services he made mightn’t sound like a lot of money nowadays, but it was the largest additional investment ever made at the time. And it was made by a government that had never heard of the Celtic Tiger — in fact one of the first things that government had to do was to devalue Ireland’s currency.

The second thing that happened in the formation of that government was that Mervyn Taylor became Minister for Equality and Law Reform. In that position over the following couple of years he wrote and passed far-reaching equality and anti-discrimination legislation, and he established the Commission on the Status of People with a Disability.

That commission’s report remains the blueprint for the rights of people with a disability. I’ve often thought myself that one of my other great failures was that if we could only have won the 1997 general election, we could have really implemented that report in full.

After 1997 Brian Cowen became Minister for Health. Although it’s also well recorded that he hated his time in that department, he took the issue of disability very seriously. In fact the “Cowen plan” introduced for the first time the notion of multi-annual funding for disability services, with the aim of making real inroads into the unacceptable waiting lists that still existed for a wide range of services.

It’s arguable (and I have said this many times before) that Brian Cowen and Brendan Howlin were the best ministers for people with disabilities we have ever seen. Both men used real influence to deliver real change.

So I wonder if the real reason the Taoiseach uses words like fool to describe critics of current policy is because he is secretly angry, maybe even ashamed, of the dismantling of progress that has gone on in recent years. When he left the Department of Health just 10 years ago (although of course he has been in government every day since then) the prospects for people with a disability were much brighter.

And of course the decade he enjoyed in Foreign Affairs, Finance and the Taoiseach’s office was the decade of our greatest economic growth, when taxes went down, spending went up, and we partied like there was no tomorrow.

BUT in that decade the disability waiting lists started to grow again. Promises were made and repeatedly broken — disability legislation eventually enacted was a poor old thing, education promises were constantly put on the long-finger, resources were earmarked and taken away again. People with a disability, who mattered so much to Cowen when he was in the Department of Health, stopped mattering to anyone else in government.

And when the recession bit and the party ended, people with a disability (perhaps the least able to bear the burden of retrenchment) suffered anyway. Shameful cuts in the paltry incomes they enjoy have been accompanied by a range of stealth cuts in their services.

“Efficiencies” and “value for money adjustments” — these are just code words for yet more cuts of a kind that can perhaps be sustained once by the service-providing agencies, but cannot be sustained indefinitely by anyone.

So who’s the fool in all of this? Not Enda Kenny, that’s for sure — he will get his chance to be judged on this issue, and on his sincerity in relation to disability, if and when he gets the big job. And our Taoiseach is certainly no fool either. So maybe it’s us, if we really believe the most vulnerable people in our society are being fully protected from miserly cutbacks. Maybe, at the end of the day, we’re the fool.