Plan should be given legal backing

The first-ever draft of national standards for the provision of quality services to people with disabilities, as well as a proposed monitoring system for ensuring compliance, was unveiled yesterday

The standards and monitoring system will be finalised in April, after a two-month consultation process involving people with disabilities and their families, service providers and State agencies.

Unfortunately, this comes far too late for Michael Cannon of Belcarra, Castlebar, who was paralysed from the neck down after an accident.

An inquest yesterday into his death at 44-years-old heard that he spent nearly five years in a medical ward at University College Hospital, Galway, because there was nowhere else for him to go after he had finished medical treatment for his severe spinal injury.

Medical evidence was that he should not have been in hospital because, although disabled, he was not sick.

Tragically, there was no plan in place for young people like him with disabilities and requiring constant care. Mr Cannon died because he refused to have a straightforward, life-saving operation for serious abdominal pain because he was frustrated at the lack of services for disabled people in this country.

His premature death was an extreme expression of the frustration and anger many people experience towards aspects of this country’s health services, which are abjectly inadequate in so many areas affecting those with disabilities.

Earlier this week, as Taoiseach Bertie Ahern launched the European Year of People with Disabilities, his Government was accused of tolerating an “acceptable level of misery” by one of the organisations which protested outside for a better service of care and facilities for people in this country with disabilities.

On a slightly different tangent, but still related to State-supplied services, or lack of them, official EU figures released yesterday show that Ireland consistently has the worst record of all 15 member states on the amount it spends on social welfare payments as a percentage of GDP over the past ten years.

Payments in the year 2000 to the unemployed, sick, elderly, homeless and disabled in Ireland amounted to just 14.1% of GDP, which was almost half the EU average of 27.3%. Only Spain, Portugal and Greece spend less than this country on social welfare payments per capita.

According to the EU survey, Ireland spent an average of €3,828 on social protection measures per head of population in 2000 in comparison to the EU average of €6,155, or that of our British neighbours’ €7,004 and the €9,055 which Sweden, at the top of the league, spent.

The figures relate to the past decade when the country was enjoying the benefits of the Celtic Tiger economy, but quite obviously those benefits did not filter downwards sufficiently to substantially improve the lot of those who were most in need.

The introduction of standards for disability services is to be welcomed because the aim is to ensure that disability services in Ireland are provided to an agreed, consistent standard on a national basis and that they contribute to a measurable improvement in the quality of life of the individuals receiving those services.

They aspire to a standard of excellence for those for whom they are intended, but it is essential that they be ultimately afforded legislative protection and not left to the largesse, or favour, of the Government of the day.