Category Archives: deinstitutionalisation

My Dystopian Life

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Guys, this evening as I sit here on my laptop, I’m starting to seriously doubt myself. When I started writing a novel two years ago now, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing or how to plan it out. And man – now it’s a mess. I can still see merit in the story, and I am a hundred percent sure what I wanted to achieve. But another story has beckoned over the last number of months, and it’s a dark, dystopian fiction (but kind of similar to the one I’m writing now in many ways).

In my fourth year of college I was introduced to the world of dystopian fiction by a professor who urged us to  read the novels and afterwards to question everything, to draw similarities between the fictional work and real life. After all, dystopian novels draw from our history. Look at 1984, for example. The use of propaganda (I.e. Hitler) to brainwash the public into trusting the ‘government’, the deliberate rewriting of history to suit a warped political agenda, the destruction of language so that the ‘proles’ have no means of expressing anger towards the Big Brother regime (any of this ringing a bell? Tuam Babies? Garda Corruption?) These are all ways in which people are worn down and forced into a narrative they do not want to partake in. And of course, rebellious Winston is forced into Room 101, where he is tortured into submission when faced with his darkest fear: rats.

Watching the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has reawakened my fascination with the dystopian form, and it’s interesting to watch my husband’s outraged reaction to the show every Sunday and to point out to him, just as we did in Apocalypse Class ten years ago, the similarities between Gilead and the world we live in now. Of course, we don’t live in the nightmarish worlds of these two novels. But I definitely feel trapped in some kind of dystopian nightmare.

I live in a country that is deliberately denying me my human rights, in a world where I constantly have to prove myself in order to have any kind of credibility. A world in which disability is seen as a medical problem rather than a social one. A world where my voice and the voice of many disabled people are dismissed as trivial or unimportant. The problem is that speaking openly and honestly about disability isn’t seen as ‘cool’ or interesting unless your views are endorsed by some random celebrity or politician, who has no idea what it’s like to be viewed as an inconvenience by your own government.

I believe in something called the philosophy of Independent Living. It was originally an American concept, its birth coinciding with other major political movements originating in the US in the 1960s. Basically, many people, including disabled people, were sick to death of being discriminated against and denied their basic human rights. And so they fought. They protested. Above all, they made it quite clear that the only real authority on the subject of disability were disabled people themselves.

Fast-forward almost sixty years, and what’s changed? Sure, things have improved. Access has improved. Disabled people even have careers and families now. But don’t be fooled: these things haven’t and still don’t come easy. We still have to fight, fight, fight.

But what’s the alternative to fighting? What would happen if disabled people sat back and said ‘sure what’s the point? What can we do?’ Well, I’ll paint you a picture, shall I?

If we continue to allow organisations to represent us instead of us representing ourselves, sooner or later we won’t be trusted in our own opinions at all. We won’t ever challenge ourselves and we will become complacent, so much so that we won’t even notice our human rights being stripped away, one by one.

If we don’t actively promote the social model of disability and be adamant and unwavering in our belief that it’s the society we live in that’s the problem, we will always be seen as patients to be improved, fixed or cured, and future generations will fail to acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong with us.

Today, across Ireland, so many disabled people in Ireland do not get a say in what time to get out of bed, when to eat dinner or where they live. Many are stuck in hospitals or in their parents’ homes where they have no control over many aspects of their lives. This is not okay. Please don’t shrug your shoulders and say ‘oh well that’s just the way it is at the moment, what can we do?’

Imagine if you had to justify every single little decision in order to be able to do what you wanted.

Imagine having to prove yourself every single day in everything you do, and be expected to do so with a smile.

Imagine having to downplay your abilities, almost to the point of degradation, and having to expose your vulnerabilities before getting the basic help you need to live independently.

This isn’t a dystopian novel. This is Ireland, right now.

And for many, it’s a scarier place than any fictional dystopian world ever created.

 

I’m only human, after all…

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TMI alert, people: I’m currently in the middle of my, shall we say, ’emotional’ time of the month. And as every woman out there knows, during this period (pun intended) we can become irrationally angry or overwhelmingly emotional for no apparent reason (but hey, isn’t that what chocolate is made for?) Anyway, there is a point to this, I promise. Stay with me.

My husband, my daughter and I were travelling in the car on Monday when ‘Human’ by Rag’n’Bone Man came on the radio. Of course, being an emotionally unstable female, I was instantly in floods of tears, much to the surprise of my husband who nearly crashed his car in shock.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he blurted out, while I wiped my tears. I shook my head.

‘It’s crazy time again,’ I joked as I tried to compose myself. But there was more to it than that, and he knew it too. And I didn’t have the words to explain. I do now, though.

The energy of the song and the repetitive line ‘I’m only human after all’ brings to mind what’s been going on in the media over the last few months with the remains found in the septic tank at the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. Like many of us I feel sick as I think about all those women, both young and old, who gave birth to their babies and never knew what became of them. It’s likely that some, if not most of these pregnancies were unplanned, and instead of being supported these women were disgraced, disowned by their families, and left in the hands of the nuns. You’ve read some of the stories, I’m sure. It’s truly harrowing stuff, and it’s been playing on my mind for the last two months.

How can we claim to be compassionate when we don’t even allow people to be human?

I live in a country where my rights as a person with a disability are not protected. This is because something called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (or the UNCRPD) hasn’t been ratified by the Irish government. In theory, this Convention guarantees that no person with a disability should be forced to live in an institutional setting against their will. It guarantees access to Personal Assistance as a right, not a privilege. Those who have ratified the Convention (and Ireland is the only EU country that hasn’t) are answerable to the UN if human rights are breached. With constant threats of cuts to PA hours and people with disabilities having to give twenty four hours to use public transport, Ireland would certainly have a lot to answer for.

What upsets me the most is when you have a disability, you’re not allowed to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, takes wrong turns and yet, when you have a disability you’re either expected to be some kind of Superwoman, or an utter failure. If you make a mistake, well, obviously you’re not cut out for education or parenthood or whatever it was you were trying to do. People judge each other; I’m no different. But this pressure to live up to an arbitrary standard, set by people who may have no experience of disability, is overwhelming. As my loyal followers are aware by now, I came up against intense pressure to prove myself when I had my baby girl. And as you may be aware, I never sought help for my postnatal depression which lasted two and a half years because I was afraid that, combined with my disability, it would give the HSE the authority to take my daughter.

And my overwhelmed, hormonal, PMSing self thinks this is truly unfair. I feel frustrated and tired with it all, and I only wish there was more I could do to challenge this injustice, to stop history from repeating itself. Sometimes I wonder if life would be easier if I wasn’t so sensitive, so stubborn, if I just didn’t care. But the truth is, I do care. A lot. Too much.

But there isn’t much I can do at  eleven at night, and I’m pretty stuffed from that Easter Egg I’ve just polished off…

Hey, don’t judge me, I’m PMSing.

…and I’m only human, after all…

How Many More Graces?

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I go through phases, extremes of mood and thoughts. Sometimes I’m elated. I love writing. I know I’ve made the right choices in life. Other times I worry that I’m making myself increasingly unemployable as the days go past.

I haven’t really left the Centre for Independent Living behind, of course. I still volunteer a lot of my time to promoting the philosophy of independent living and campaigning for equal rights for people with disabilities. In fact, I’m now part of an activist group called By Us With Us. we’re still relatively new, but we recently set up a blog which is well worth a look.

Independent Living is not my job any more, my husband insists. You’re a writer now. You should be dedicating every free minute you have to writing and trying to get published.

And oh, how I would love to! How I wish life could be this simple, that I could have the luxury of locking the office door every day, focusing on nothing but putting words down on paper. My  mother used to tell me that I can’t fix all of the wrongs in the world. She was right, of course, but there are so, so many wrongs that I feel that I must try and do something;

As most of you know, I’m writing a novel at the moment, a story that initially came to me in 2007 while I was unemployed for six months. The story explores the life of a disabled woman who was tortured by a nun in a residential institution and how she copes with the aftermath of that abuse. Lately, I’ve been finding it hard to stay motivated. This is off the wall, I thought to myself as I rewrote the first chapter the other night (for the sixth time). No-one reading  this is going to believe that someone could be treated with such cruelty.

I’m not a trusting person anyway, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this distrust, particularly in the government at the moment (or, as it is starting to transpire, any government before or after this). Yesterday, the story of the abuse suffered by ‘Grace’ dominated headlines, a girl with an intellectual disability (now forty years old) who was abused while in foster care. It’s still a little unclear the extent or the nature of the abuse; some of it is of a sexual nature.

Grace has an intellectual disability and in the eyes of the Irish state at least, cannot be trusted to have her own narrative voice. And in Ireland, this is not limited to those with intellectual disabilities. The opinions and lived experiences of disabled people in Ireland don’t seem to matter to our policy makers.

I doubt that Grace is an isolated case. So why is there such little uproar about the status quo? There is mounting evidence to illustrate that disabled people should not be living in institutions, that the state cannot be trusted to provide a decent standard of care. Who can?

In December 2014, the nation was shocked by the Aras Attracta scandal, which saw people with intellectual disabilities being physically and psychologically tortured by those who were meant to care for them. People were disgusted by the RTE documentary; at one point my husband, whose stomach was turning, asked me to turn it off. I refused.

‘How can you sit there and watch that?’ he asked, bewildered by my seeming nonchalance.

‘Because,’ I replied, ‘Ireland has buried its head in the sand for too long. We have a government, and this and successive governments not only allow this abuse to happen, but by implementing cutbacks create situations such as these. We need to see this and someone needs to take responsibility.’

The Aras Attracta staff were later held accountable and given paltry sentences of community service. But what happens to those who continue to abuse people with disabilities behind closed doors, and are never questioned? I’m not talking solely about people in congregated living settings – I’m talking about people who suffer abuse at the hands of their families too.

When I started doing some research for my novel, what struck me was the lack of information available about how disabled people were treated in Ireland over the last fifty years. Apart from a few research papers, the Irish Wheelchair Association’s collection of stories, Extraordinary Lives, and this documentary on the programme ‘Horizon’ called ‘The Weakest Link’ on RTE in 1966, there isn’t a lot of documented stories about what life was like for a disabled person, particularly in a residential setting. So essentially I’m writing a story about something I have little information.

But if I can achieve this, then I will be happy. Because it’s time for disabled people to tell their stories, and to discover and reclaim their histories.

If we don’t, then our stories will be like Grace’s – spoken through the mouths of people on the outside.  Our stories should – and deserve to be – woven into the mainstream fabric of Irish society.

Talkin’ bout a revolution (again)

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Election time has arrived again, and the atmosphere is almost electric. Posters on every pole, letterboxes crammed with manifestos, Facebook (and Twitter, I assume) home to pre-election scandal, the most recent being a van used for a candidate’s campaign parked illegally in an accessible parking space. This move caused outrage across social media sites this morning. Being a poet at heart, I saw this a metaphor for how far people with disabilities have yet to go in their quest for equality in Irish society.

Over the last five years, my profession has allowed me to explore and learn about the Independent Living Movement. I’ve studied the history of people with disabilities prior to the Movement and was physically sick after reading about the T4 Project which took place under Hitler’s reign during the Second World War. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept, I am talking about a scheme that Hitler himself devised where people with ‘incurable’ disabilities were institutionalised and later gassed or injected with a lethal substance (a ‘mercy death’).

The Independent Living Movement came almost twenty years later, coinciding with other human rights movements. I can imagine the excitement in the air as Ed Roberts, a young man and polio survivor, enlisted the assistance of an ‘attendant’ which enabled him to live away from home and attend university. He and a group of fellow ‘disabled students’ formed a group called the ‘Rolling Quads’ and they established the first Center for Independent Living in 1972. At this stage, the concept of somebody with a disability having control over the fundamental aspects of their everyday lives, such as deciding what time to get up in the morning, where to go, whether to work or pursue leisure activities was a foreign one.

And despite the Independent Living Movement arriving in Ireland in 1992, the physical and emotional freedom of people with disabilities is still in question.

We have to ask ourselves why, twenty-two years since the Personal Assistant Service was made available in Ireland, people in this country are forced to live in residential institutions and hospitals; why people who need the assistance to live independently live in fear of vital services being taking away; and how we got to a point where we say nothing in response to all the cutbacks in recent years in case we ‘rock the boat’, even though many people remain on a sinking ship, waiting to be rescued by a Government who caused us to sink in the first place.

It seems that Government is only interested in helping people with disabilities when times are good. Despite all the studies that have been conducted on the viability of the Personal Assistant Service, people are still living in institutions and hospitals, where they exercise little choice over their everyday routine. Having a disability is an expensive way of life, and yet medical cards are being revoked, housing grants are being refused and household allowances are almost non-existent. These cuts inhibit people with disabilities from participating fully in Irish society and ironically from contributing to society rather than sponging off the State.

So until we stand united and say ‘enough is enough – we want equality and guaranteed access to the services that will enable us to achieve it’, we as people with disabilities will always be vulnerable, passive recipients of services that are reliant on state funding. We need to ensure that in the future, we regain choice and control over our lives. The time for talking is now over; we need to speak louder with our actions.

Yet again.