I am sharing this essay to outline why I am so vehemently supporting the #PASNOW campaign.

 

Discuss the challenges to the realisation of the Independent Living Philosophy in Ireland since the onset of the economic recession.

 

The philosophy of Independent Living was intended to be the cornerstone of the provision of Personal Assistance Services in Ireland. In its truest form, as noted by Morris (1993), independent living is about recognising that each individual has something to offer and that disabled people have “the right to assert control over their lives” (p21). The philosophy is entrenched in the belief that disabled people should have the same quality of life as their non-disabled peers. Yet, there have always been challenges to the realisation of this philosophy in Ireland, and these have become more apparent since the onset of the economic recession in 2008. Berghs (2014, p272) notes that “in a time of austerity, where government budgets are being cut […] independent living or care in a community cannot be ensured”. Independent Living has enriched the lives of many disabled people in Ireland. Yet its philosophy remains at odds with Irish culture, which has historically favoured a charitable approach to funding disability services. In addition, the Personal Assistance service, considered to be the cornerstone of the philosophy, was almost eradicated in September 2012 and the right to access a Personal Assistant remains unprotected by Irish law. A study conducted by the European Network of Independent Living (ENIL) in 2019 indicated that Irish Personal Assistance Services are not perceived to be underpinned by the independent living philosophy (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p13). Additionally, many disabled people are incarcerated in hospitals and institutions in direct violation of their human rights. Of further concern to true “Leaders” or Personal Assistant Service users is the expectation that Leaders should rely on family members for their needs and the consequent strain this can cause to family relationships. In this essay, the ideals of the independent living philosophy will be weighed up against the current reality in Ireland, and it will be demonstrated that Irish culture and the independent living philosophy has always been, and remains, at odds with each other.

 

Firstly, in examining the challenges in meeting the ideals of the philosophy of independent living, it is important to outline what this philosophy entails. According to Bruce (1999), independent living shifts the perception of the disabled person from being an object of care “to a point where they acquire rights of full participation and equality” (p5). In addition, as Morris (1993) notes, the independent living philosophy involves “acquiring the skills and support necessary for severely impaired people to have freedom to live where and how we choose with full control over our lives” (p20). Traditionally, the Personal Assistant Service has been used as a tool by disabled people in achieving independent living. Personal Assistance dates back to 1970s America, when Ed Roberts and a group of disabled college students, collectively known as “the Rolling Quads” employed Personal Assistants which enabled them to attend university and subsequently gain employment. This led to the establishment of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley in 1972.

 

 

It took twenty years for the philosophy of independent living to travel to Ireland. The European Network of Independent Living (ENIL) confirms that the establishment of the first Irish Center for Independent Living was instigated by disabled people themselves (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p13). Martin Naughton, who had spent his childhood in St. Mary’s in Baldoyle, came across the Center for Independent Living when he was travelling in the US during the nineteen-eighties. In an interview with Joanna Marsden, Naughton recalled his time in America and how he saw the potential to bring the philosophy to Ireland:

I began to think of all the people back home, many of whom I had semi-reared in some sense when I was in Baldoyle, who were living in institutions. The temptation to do something became too great and I felt the pull back home. (Marsden, 2010; cited in Conroy, 2018, p227)

The establishment of the Personal Assistant Service in Ireland was also the result of the retaliation of disabled people who were tired of having no control over their own lives. Naughton stated in an Irish Times interview in 2015 that in Ireland, a disabled person had traditionally been perceived as “someone to be cared for rather than cared about” (www.irishtimes.com). Conroy notes that one of the main reasons for the formation of the Irish Independent living movement was a reluctance on the part of disabled people at the time to continue living with resentful family members or in residential institutions. (Conroy, 2018, p229).

 

However, translating the philosophy of independent living into an Irish context has always proved challenging, especially within a predominantly Catholic culture that perceives disabled people as objects of charity instead of equal citizens deserving of rights (Toolan, 2003, p175).  A study entitled Extending the Boundaries was carried out in 2006 to examine the progress of the Independent Living Movement from its introduction to Ireland in the early ‘nineties. Dixon commented that:

While the experience of Independent Living has been broadly accepted as a positive one for disabled people, there is a concern over the uneven spread of this service provision, and a worry that the philosophy of Independent Living, which should underpin service provision, is being diluted. (Dixon, 2006, p17)

 

This quote suggests that there were challenges to realising the Independent Living Philosophy prior to the onset of economic recession. However, the philosophy has become further diluted since the publication of Extending the Boundaries. Given Ireland’s tendency to treat disabled people as “victims” deserving of charity rather than autonomous individuals in their own right, fundraising initiatives has always been the norm in many disability organisations, including RehabCare and the Irish Wheelchair Association. Toolan notes that “At the same time as disabled rights groups are looking for the enactment of disability rights legislation, charities under a ‘not for profit’ banner are projecting demeaning and dehumanising messaging in order to attract resources for their service” (Toolan, 2003, p174).  This conflict between the need for the Center for Independent Living to portray itself as a rights-based organisation and the requirement to secure funding for services came to the fore during recessionary times, with Irish disabled activists reluctant to portray themselves as vulnerable in order to secure funding. However the RehabCare and Central Remedial Clinic scandals, which revealed that charitable donations were being used to inflate salaries, is one reason why sustaining a charitable approach will not work into the future. Morris (1993, p7) states that the supposed dependency and inadequacy of disabled people is perpetuated through the inappropriate application of medical expertise and the growth of the charity sector, and the way disabled people are perceived within the charity model.

 

 

Indeed, the medical model, coupled with the charity model, has had a negative influence on the strength of the Independent Living philosophy. Since the onset of the recession, disabled people have been forced to portray themselves as dependent, passive recipients of services rather than equal citizens who can live independently with the help of a Personal Assistance service. This is at odds with the Center for Independent Living’s “rights not charity” mantra. Toolan (2003) notes that being drenched in the doctrine of Catholicism, Ireland has always leaned heavily on the charitable approach, being “a society that is far from comfortable with individual rights” (p175). This can be seen in the current provision of the Personal Assistance Service. Personal Assistance was initially introduced as a pilot project in 1992, funding for which came from the EU Horizon programme. Following the two-year pilot, the regional Health Boards (now the HSE) and FAS continued to fund Personal Assistance, but in technical terms, Personal Assistance still holds “pilot project” status, and seems to be allocated on an “ad hoc” basis, with the number of hours given to Leaders dependent on which CHO (Community Health Organisation) covers that Leader’s service. Contrary to what the philosophy of Independent Living advocates, a Leader does not have full control over the hiring and firing of their Personal Assistants (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p21). In addition, Leaders lack control over who works for them, and at what time, meaning that assistance hours provided are uncompromisingly rigid (ibid, p20). Presently, access to a Personal Assistant is dependent on an assessment which is usually carried out by a Public Health Nurse, which focuses on basic activities of Independent Living, such as washing, dressing and feeding. This medicalised approach goes against the social model on which the Independent Living Philosophy is based and, as noted by ENIL (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p25) personal assistants are not trained in the independent living philosophy. In addition, access to Personal Assistance is not treated as a human right (ibid, p13). Since the onset on the recession, tasks such as personal care have been prioritised over the need for help with household tasks, accessing employment and education, socialising and shopping. Jolly (2010) notes that attempts to control expenditure on Personal Assistance occurs when a government restricts “the tasks that a personal assistant can do, meaning the tasks that [the HSE or FAS] will pay for a personal assistant to do” (p7). This rationing of Personal Assistance is at odds with the aims of the Center for Independent Living, as noted by Bruce (2000): “From the outset CIL located its activities in the context of seeing disability as a rights and investment issue to enable disabled people to have the same opportunities as their non-disabled peers” (p11, emphasis mine).

 

During the recession, the right to Personal Assistant Services was constantly threatened by the government, and indeed the service continues to face the threat of cutbacks (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p14). In September 2012, the Minister for Health, James Reilly announced that twelve million euro would be cut from the Personal Assistance budget, showing government’s lack of understanding of the true value of the service. The decision was only reversed following a three-day protest by disability activists, calling themselves the “Leader’s Alliance”, outside the Dail. This radical action was necessary as the right to Personal Assistance currently has no basis in Irish law.

 

In reality, the fact that provision for Personal Assistance is not yet legislated for in Ireland means that the service remains vulnerable to cutbacks at any given time, at the discretion of the Irish government. In 2013, the Center for Independent Living Carmichael House (renamed Independent Living Movement Ireland in September 2018) proposed to legislate for Personal Assistance. On 7 May 2014, a motion was debated and passed by the Seanad to allow for the legislation of Personal Assistance (Independent Living Movement Ireland, 2017). The motion noted that this legislation would build on the Value for Money and Policy Review of the Disability Services, the National Disability Strategy and the Action Plan for Jobs 2014. The proposal for the legislation stated that

the purpose of Personal Assistance is to ensure that people with disabilities enjoy the same opportunities as all members of society, to ensure that they have the same choices as others, and to afford them the means to control how they wish to pursue their lives. (ILMI, 2017, p31)

Under the proposed legislation, it was suggested that Personal Assistance hours would be granted “without regard to any upper limit on the number of hours and without regard to the cost of the service or the means of the individual” (ILMI, 2017, p33). However, the proposal also advised that the Department of Social Protection should take charge of the funding allocation for Personal Assistant Services, raising concerns that the service may be means tested in the future, potentially leaving Leaders “worse off” in terms of the level of service they would receive (ibid, p13).

 

However, for reasons unknown to this author, the Personal Assistance Bill was never enacted by the Oireachtas. Passing this law would enable Ireland to uphold its obligations in the eyes of the United Nations. According to Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities (UNCRPD), “Persons with disabilities [should] have access to a range of in-home, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to support living and inclusion in the community” (UN, 2006, p14). Although Ireland was one of the first countries to sign up for the UNCRPD in 2007, it was the last country in the European Union to ratify it on 7 March 2018, after an eleven year wait. In response, Independent Living Movement Ireland initiated a #PASNow campaign towards the end of 2018. It involves encouraging individual Leaders to contact their local politicians and educate them about the importance of the Personal Assistance Service. In addition to encouraging the legislation of the service, the campaign also calls for a rights-based definition of a Personal Assistant, as well as outlining what distinguishes Personal Assistance from home help (Independent Living Movement Ireland, 2018). The #PASNow campaign evolved following research which found that a mere 2,200 disabled people in Ireland received a Personal Assistant service in 2017 (Conroy, 2018, p232). In addition, Conroy notes that almost forty-five percent of Leaders receive a mere forty-five minutes of Personal Assistance a day, which illustrates how narrow and medicalised the criteria for receiving a Personal Assistant has become. Given that a Personal Assistant has been described by many Leaders as “my arms and my legs”, Conroy notes that forty-five minutes is not enough time to allow a disabled person to live a complete life (Conroy, 2018, p231). Clearly, the fact that such a high percentage of Leaders have access to such little service demonstrates that Ireland does not yet perceive Independent Living to be a human rights issue.

 

In fact, Ireland remains far from recognising the rights of disabled people to live in their own communities, and this is evident from the high numbers living in residential institutions. Inclusion Ireland estimated that as of 2016, just over three thousand disabled people in Ireland were living in residential or congregated settings (www.inclusionireland.ie, Accessed 19 March 2019). Article 19 of the UNCRPD (UN, 2006) states: “Persons with disabilities have the opportunity to choose their place of residence and where and with whom they live on an equal basis with others and are not obliged to live in a particular living arrangement”. However, for many disabled people in Ireland, this is not yet a reality. The HSE report Time to Move on from Congregated Settings: A Strategy for Community Inclusion notes that between 1999 and 2008, more people moved into residential settings (693) than moved out of them into the mainstream community (619) (HSE, 2011, p3). It is evident that there needs to be more investment into Personal Assistance to allow people to move out of residential settings. Conroy (2018) states that Ireland is currently spending three times as much money on institutional and nursing home care than on “home care” (not necessarily Personal Assistance, as in its truest form, Leaders employ and direct their own Personal Assistants) (Conroy, 2018, p235). In 2015, Martin Naughton organised a three-day protest outside the Dáil following an announcement by Taoiseach Enda Kenny that four hundred and fifty million euro was to be invested into institutional living arrangements for disabled people. In his explanation about why the protest was organised, Naughton said

 

If the Government continues to go down the route of refurbishing and building home   care and residential settings, as they have announced, they will have to put people into those homes. We need to get away from this model of incarceration. (Flaherty, Irish Times, 2015)

 

 

It has been noted that Ireland finds it difficult to embrace independent living provisions, preferring instead to rely on outdated solutions such as residential institutions (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p18). However, the challenge in convincing governments to invest in Personal Assistance is not exclusively an Irish one. Speaking at the European Day Conference for People with Disabilities in 2011, UK activist John Evans feared that a potential effect of a lack of Personal Assistance was that it could once again give rise to a culture of institutionalisation (Evans, 2011). In an attempt to highlight this issue, disabled people across Europe partake in a biannual “Freedom Drive”, an initiative which was the brainchild of the late Martin Naughton, and began in 2003. The activists typically present their “demands” to the European Parliament, most notably the demand to close residential institutions and to legislate for access to Personal Assistance. Besides being in violation of Article 19 of the UNCRPD, Conroy (2018, p233-4) notes that the four main characteristics of living in an institution (“depersonalisation, rigidity of routine, block treatment and social distance”) are at odds with the philosophy of independent Living. In addition, being “warehoused” in an institution is often associated with a reduced quality of life as Maggie Hynes, a disabled British activist noted: “Institutions were places where people like me died in” (Hynes, 1983; cited in Morris, 1993, p22).

 

One example of the inappropriate use of institutionalisation in Ireland was the case of Julia Thurmann, whose case has garnered much media attention since 2014. Thurmann, who was hospitalised after contracting the ADEM virus, is now paralysed from the waist down, but is still able to work and would be able to live fully independently had she accessible housing and a Personal Assistance service. However, due to the fact she could not move back to her inaccessible flat on her discharge from Dun Laoghaire Rehabilitation Hospital, she has spent the last ten years living in a nursing home in north County Dublin. It was reported in the Dublin Gazette that Thurmann spends four hundred euro a month on taxis in an attempt to ensure that she is not isolated from her mainstream community (Pownall, 2019). At the beginning of this year, Thurmann was informed that accessible accommodation would be made available to her by the end of 2019, after an eleven year wait.

 

Another consequence of the failure to legislate for Personal Assistance is that it often leaves disabled people with no choice but to rely on family members for assistance. As a consequence, families become under strain, and disabled people cannot enjoy meaningful relationships with family members as equals. This is a threat to the independent living philosophy, as it reverts back to the notion that disabled people are objects of care instead of autonomous individuals. Morris (1993) notes that

In the context of economic inequality which accompanies physical impairment […] the need for personal assistance has been translated into a need for ‘care’ in the sense of a need to be looked after. Once Personal Assistance is seen as ‘care’ then the carer, whether professional or a relative, becomes the person in charge. The disabled person is seen as being dependent on the carer, and incapable even of taking charge of the personal assistance he/she requires. (Morris, 1993, p23)

It can be argued that portraying the disabled person as an object of care dehumanises both the disabled person themselves and those who care for them. The challenges facing family carers in Ireland have been highlighted over the last few years, most notably with an RTE documentary aired in 2017 entitled “Carers in Crisis”. One of the mothers in the documentary, Johanne Powell, who cares for her severely disabled daughter Siobhan, now in her mid-thirties, spoke about her reality as a full-time carer. In 2013, the Irish Times reported that Siobhan had been offered a place in a nursing home, which undermined Johanne’s request for home support so that Siobhan could continue living at home with her family (O’Brien, Irish Times, 2013). Although it could be argued that Siobhan is too mentally incapacitated to make any meaningful decisions over her own life, denying her the support she requires to remain in her own home evidently places strain on the mother/daughter relationship. In an interview on the Late Late Show in 2017, Johanne admitted: “I am bored, depressed, I want more, I want a life for myself” (www.irishexaminer.com, November 2016). Currently in Ireland, as noted by ENIL (Mladenov, Pokern & Bulic-Cojocariu, 2019, p18), a person’s eligibility for Personal Assistance is in part dependent on the availability of family members to assume ‘caring’ roles. This is problematic because aging parents who are currently caring for their disabled children cannot shoulder the responsibility alone, as the Carers in Crisis documentary demonstrated.

 

In conclusion, it is clear that the integrity of the independent living philosophy in Ireland has faced significant challenges since the onset of the economic recession. It is important to remember, however, that these challenges will not be eradicated by financial investment alone. Those who wish to truly embrace the Independent living philosophy need to have confidence in their own ability and power. In addition, they must reject the association of disability with charity and embrace their rights to the various supports they need in order to live independently. However the reality is that the status quo regarding Independent Living in Ireland will remain until Leaders themselves are truly empowered, through the implementation of legislation and the adoption of a rights-based approach, to make decisions affecting their own lives.

 

 

 

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Mladenov, T, Pokern, Y & Bulic-Cojocariu, I (2019) PA Checklist – A Tool for Assessing Personal Assistance Schemes. https://enil.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Mladenov_Pokern_Bulic-PA_Checklist.pdf?sfns=mo Brussels: European Network on Independent Living

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