People with Disabilities in Ireland
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By Peter Cluskey
Disability related issues will be high on the agenda of the new round of Partnership talks Fr Sean Healy, Director of the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) has said.
Speaking exclusively to Cumhacht he said that while there has been good progress on fairness and social inclusion in the 2005 and 2006 Budgets, huge inequities remain.
And to make his point he produced from his briefcase the ESRI figures which make such a convincing case. "Yes, there is a disjoint between the increasingly broad acceptance of what's required and the actual provision of what's required. It's a problem of scale. That has to be tackled and hopefully it will be during the new round of partnership talks that's currently underway."
"I'm talking about social welfare supports and retraining for employment - but I'm also talking, in particular, about non-means-tested cost-of-disability payments."
He continued: "There's a growing recognition that there's a cost attached to disability. A person may be elderly or young or unemployed, but whatever category they fall into, their disability involves an additional day-to-day cost that is unavoidable. And that should be officially recognized and dealt with on a non-means-tested basis. It's something that needs to be agreed now in principle.
Fr Healy told Cumhacht that this debate, like so many others, immediately throws up the degree to which the State's response to people with disabilities is fragmented, dealt with by too many government departments and units.
"It's a very good example of where we need joined-up government and properly integrated services."
However, change is in view, says Healy. He takes heart in particular from the recent NESC report, "The Developmental Welfare State", which the Taoiseach has recommended should form the basis for the new national agreement. "It takes a life-cycle approach to examining how supports and services should be provided - to children up to age 17, to adults aged 18 to 29, to adults between 30 and 64 . but also for the first time to those it calls 'people challenged in their personal autonomy', in other words people with disabilities.
"This is the first time people with disabilities have been recognized as one of the key cross-cutting groups in society, in relation to whom the success of government policies is measured. I believe this is a profoundly important basis on which we should build immediately."
According to the EU statistics agency, Eurostat, average EU expenditure on social provision, which covers a multitude, from healthcare to services for people with disabilities, to care of the elderly, to childcare, to housing, to unemployment to social exclusion issues, is 25 percent of GDP. But here, despite our booming economy, we have the very lowest expenditure on social provision at 14.6 percent.
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