Tag Archives: cutbacks

Enda the Line

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Finally, after what seems like an inappropriately long wait, Enda Kenny stepped down as party Leader of Fine Gael at midnight on Thursday 18 May, and a new party Leader will be announced by the 2 June.  And predictably, many people in this country, including myself, are reflecting on the work (or damage, depending on who you’re talking to) he’s done over the course of his time as Taoiseach. Many of us will not be sad to see him go, especially the many people with disabilities that he’s let down so badly over his term.

Now, I am not saying that by any means that Enda had an easy job. Nor am I denying the fact that his predecessors, Bertie Ahern in particular, left a massive mess behind that Enda would have to clean up. However, during Enda’s time as Taoiseach, I have witnessed a frightening change in the narrative of disability in this country. Perhaps it’s merely age-acquired wisdom, because I don’t remember feeling this trapped as a disabled person during the early noughties. I went to college, I found it easy enough to find summer work and for a very brief period, I was even naïve enough to view myself as equal: willing to contribute to society and worthy of respect for it as a result.

I was just watching an interview activist Joanne O’Riordan had with Gay Byrne’s RTE series The Meaning of Life, in which Joanne discussed her experience with Enda Kenny. Kenny had promised her that the funding for P.A. (Personal Assistant) Services would remain untouched, and then turned around and delivered the blow that a whopping €130million would have to be taken from the HSE Budget, including a €10m cut to the P.A. budget. This soul-shattering announcement demonstrated how little our Taoiseach thought of our lives. This announcement drove activists with disabilities to sleep out in the cold for three days outside Leinster House until these cuts were reversed. It was both a victory and a slap in the face for people with disabilities, because although we were listened to, we realised that we would always have to take drastic measures to have our voices heard.

I worked in the area of Independent Living for seven years, and Enda Kenny was Taoiseach for four of those (since 9 March, 2011). Part of the reason I made the tough decision to leave my job in 2015 was because I found it too difficult to watch, as I saw it, the degeneration of the Independent Living Philosophy. When I joined Offaly CIL first, I was told to have passion. I was encouraged to get excited about equality for people with disabilities, to see the Personal Assistant Service as the key to achieving this equality. I was told that Independent Living was about freedom, control, choice. It was a liberating service with its own unique history and philosophy.

For me, Enda Kenny’s government destroyed all of that. Suddenly, service provision was about a hierarchy of needs, and the service became more about covering the basics rather than encouraging ability and individuality. When I spoke to people about this great ‘philosophy,’ I felt I was lying to them. I would ring my fellow Leaders and ask them to come into the office for a coffee and a chat, and they would tentatively ask me ‘are my hours going to be cut?’ I have to hand it to Offaly CIL, they did and still do resist cutbacks and they go above and beyond to protect Leader’s hours. But it infuriates me that because of Enda Kenny’s nonchalant attitude towards disability that my fellow Leaders continue to live in fear.

I’ll never forget reading the coverage of the three-day protest Martin Naughton led outside the Dáil in 2015 (unfortunately, I was out of the country at the time – yes, I really am just an armchair activist). Martin was asking for the opportunity for people with disabilities to have more control over their own lives by allowing money normally paid directly to service providers to be redirected to the experts, the person with the disability. The protest bore little results apart from a lot of negative press about Enda Kenny, with people by now being so annoyed with him that the focus from the public was more about what a complete tool he is as opposed to what Martin Naughton was asking for (the right for people with disabilities to truly experience Independent Living, in case you’re in doubt). And yet, even after talking to Martin and other disability activists, the future of our lifeline – the Personal Assistant Service – is constantly in jeopardy.

Oh, one more thing – some of you out there think that Leo Varadkar should take over as Taoiseach. And perhaps he should, but I’m personally a bit wary. Aside from the fact that our health system is currently a shambles, a report entitled ‘Make Work Pay for People with Disabilities’ recommends that people with disabilities keep their medical card, as well as raising the current cut-off point of €120 before they start to lose their Disability Allowance. Now, don’t misinterpret me – this is great progress – but given that a report from Inclusion Ireland in 2014 estimates the weekly cost of disability to be €207, it seems that there is a long way to go before people with disabilities can expect a decent quality of life. Also, there is a fear that this system could force people into work that they are genuinely incapable of, a bit like what’s happening in the UK at the moment.

So goodbye, Enda Kenny. Undoubtedly you did many great things for many people across Ireland during your time. You’ll have to forgive the disabled population of Ireland for struggling to remember exactly what they were.

And a quick message for your replacement, whoever you may be: We as people with disabilities have put up with enough shit over the last nine years to last a lifetime. We definitely are not in the mood to tolerate any more. Just thought you should know that.

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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.