Ireland’s disabled face discrimation in education and finding work

JUST under 600,000 people.

They would fill Croke Park seven times, and it would be full to bursting point.

The great majority of those 600,000people are over 18, and that means there’s enough of them to elect nearly 60 TDs. In other words, they could easily hold the balance of power after any election if they chose to.

That’s the number of people with a disability in Ireland. The figure is contained in the latest release from the Central Statistics Office, published last week. There is a host of fascinating, and frightening, statistics in the document, which is a detailed analysis of the census of 2011. Among the most striking are these: As we get older, the most common disability (that up to half of us suffer from) is difficulty with pain. That’s often associated with breathing difficulties or other chronic illnesses, and is usually accompanied by a difficulty with basic physical activities. Nearly 150,000 people in Ireland are either blind or suffer from significant visual impairment, or are deaf or have great difficulty hearing.

Some 57,709 people have an intellectual disability, with a further 137,000 people suffering from difficulties learning, remembering or concentrating. That’s about one in every 25 of our population. And the census also showed that 96,004 people have a psychological or emotional condition.

Statistics, of course, are only part of the story. But the figures paint a stark reality. Pert of that reality is that disability doesn’t just happen in isolation. It has consequences for the people who have a disability, and for everyone else.

The census reveals, for instance, that, among disabled people aged 15 to 49, one in six have completed no higher than primary level education (compared with one in twenty of the general population). Secondary school was the highest level completed by around a quarter of people with disabilities, while one in seven of non-disabled people stopped there.

The link between disability and education extends, as you’d expect, to the workplace. This is from the press release accompanying the CSO publication: “There were 162,681 persons with a disability in the labour force giving a labour force participation rate of 30%. That compares to 61.9% for the overall population. Of the total of 542,277 people aged 15 and over with a disability, 112,502 or 20.7% were at work. This compares with 50.1% of the overall population aged 15 and over.”

In short, people with a disability are a drain on the State. They don’t go far enough in education, and they are seriously under-employed. Rather than contributing to the exchequer in these hard-pressed times, they are a burden, costing billions in income supports and in services.

You know the funny thing, though? That’s a fundamentally wrong conclusion to come to. And I’ve never in my life met a person with a disability who welcomes that description. What people with a disability long for, above all, is greater independence. They want to make the same contribution as anyone else, and they want to live life to the full, rather than the half-life of dependence on the state.

Yes, it is the case that if you have a disability both education and work are more challenging. If you’re struggling with pain, if you find it really difficult to navigate because of a physical disability, if you find life overwhelming because of depression, then getting to school or holding down a job can seem like insurmountable barriers.

But it’s also the case that both the education system and the workplace routinely, and casually, discriminate against people with a disability. Especially in a recession, when employers can pick and choose, they don’t have to hire employees in respect of whom they might have to make some reasonable accommodation.

The law of the land protects people with a disability who are already in work from discrimination. At least it’s supposed to. But the hidden discrimination against people with a disability that prevents them from breaking into the workforce is as ever-present today is it always was.

And the education system is just the same. We’re all familiar with the cutbacks of recent years, especially as they have affected the supports available to people with an intellectual disability. But, at every level of the system, disability is discouraged. Not only are buildings and classrooms inaccessible, even the curriculum is loaded against people with a disability.

It’s all underpinned by attitudes. For generations in Ireland, the thought that has been most embedded in our culture where disability is concerned is that it’s a charity issue. We’ve never been slow to put money into a tin when it’s for blind people or people with an intellectual disability.

But when you instinctively think about people with a disability as deserving of our charity, you’re not thinking of them as people who are equal. Equal people don’t deserve charity. They’re citizens with rights of their own. Equal people who have obstacles and barriers to overcome. Often, they are barriers we have put there.

Go back to those numbers for a minute, and here’s the scary thought. If people with a disability in Ireland really got themselves organised, they could make absolutely certain that disability, and how it’s treated, became the number one issue of our time. They could not only demand to be treated as equal, they could fundamentally change all our attitudes.

There are as many people with a disability in Ireland as there are organised trade union members. There are four times as many people with a disability as there are people employed in the entire agri-business sector. Extraordinarily, there are 80 times as many people with a disability as there are members of Ibec.

I mention those three groups — trade unions, Ibec, farmers and agri-business — to make a simple point. Just think for a moment about the power of the lobbies that those three sectors have been able to develop. Absolutely nothing wrong with that in a representative democracy. But compare those lobbies with the powerlessness of disability. 600,000 people, with one cause in common, but with no voice.

Never mind filling Croke Park seven times. If people with disabilities could fill Croke Park once, the system would start to listen. If as many of them were to march on Dáil Eireann as we saw recently when the farmers of Ireland had a legitimate point to make, the system would start to respond.

When you have barriers to overcome, living ordinary daily life can be difficult and challenging enough. It’s tough to get organised and to start campaigning. It demands a level of energy that is often needed to meet the challenges of the ordinary day.

But when you look at the census, the unspoken thing that leaps out at you is that there is huge strength in numbers. People with disabilities have power, and they have never chosen to use it. Because they haven’t, they have never been accorded the policy priority that greater equality deserves.

Of course, there’s nothing scary at all about the possibility that people with disabilities might one day rise up and demand their rights. Perhaps the really scary thing is that we have been able to ignore them so long.