Reader's Blog: We have failed our people with disabilities
We certainly need a rights culture in terms of basic human rights for the disabled.
Hundreds of people are in need of daycare facilities.
Thousands of people with physical disabilities do not benefit from day activity or development.
Many feel they are prisoners in their own homes, and they do not get the supports to access what many take for granted on a daily basis.
The legislation concentrates not on what people have but on what they need, basic needs like education, accessible transport, respite and residential care, aids, and appliances.
For example, I, the parent of an eight-year-old child, recently sought a bus pass to take the child from Midleton to a special school in Cork City.
When I made enquiries, I was told, “since there was no special service to the school in question, a bus pass could not be approved,” I am pursuing this case.
People with disabilities, their families, advocates, or carers, should not have to take to the streets or to the courts to demonstrate that they have a right to daycare, respite care, education, and training, and to transport, yet we have seen people taking to the streets and organising public meetings over the years to try to vindicate those rights.
It is no longer acceptable that people have to do that.
More than 350,000 people in Ireland have a disability.
For too long, justifiable expectations of equal access and equal rights have exceeded a less than perfect reality.
When rights are acknowledged they must be universally applied.
We have failed our people with disabilities and, in the process, seriously damaged our society.
How much talent has been wasted because people with disabilities have not been given the opportunities and means to develop their gifts?
Shame on us.
