People with Disabilities in Ireland
4th Floor Jervis House
Jervis Street
Dublin 1
Telephone: 01 87 21 74 4
Fax: 01 87 21 77 1
Email: info@pwdi.ie
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Jacqui Browne, Sharon Browne and Helen Fitzgerald
Published by the Irish Council of People with Disbilities
July 1999
People with Disabilities in Ireland (PwDI) was founded in 1997. It is the national representative organisation of people with disabilities. PWDI aims to promote the human, civil, social, economic, political and cultural rights and freedoms of people with disabilities and to achieve the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities. It has approximately 6,000 members nation wide. There are 30 networks of PWDI, one for each county in the republic, four in Dublin and two in Cork. Each Network is cross-disability representative: members are people with physical, sensory, learning and mental/emotional disabilities, parents, relatives and carers of people with disabilities, advocates and organisations of people with disabilities.
This handbook is a supplement of the EU Horizon training programme of the PWDI "Training and Development of County Networks". This training programme is part of the Employment Horizon Initiative of the European Social Fund, which primarily intents to explore new and more effective ways of tackling unemployment and marginalisation for the labour market among people with disabilities. An important means of bringing people with disabilities in from the margins is strengthening their own organisations and networks. With this objective, the PWDI Horizon programme consists of three training modules: Communicating with Others, Working with Others and Disability Awareness, Employment and Equality Issues. This handbook was developed as an additional resource for the "Communicating with Others" module. It was compiled for the use of the thirty Networks of PWDI and outlines how to devise and employ PR and media strategies. It can also be a useful tool for all disability organisations and voluntary or community groups.
One of the main aims of PWDI is to secure the implementation of the 402 recommendations made by the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities in their report (1996) "A Strategy for Equality". If people are to support your cause, they need to know you exist. The quickest and most effective way to make people aware of disability issues is to use the media.
Changing attitudes is difficult. But when disability issues are mentioned in newspapers and magazines, or on radio and televisions, they are going straight into people's homes, into their lives. Once there, even new and strange ideas start to sound more familiar and acceptable.
The media - newspapers, radio, television and advertising - have an enormous and increasing influence on the way almost every person on the planet views the world, their own and other's place in it. What we see, read and listen to mixes with our own direct experience to shape the way we think and feel about things. If, as people with disabilities, we wish to make changes in the way the non-disabled world thinks about us, we must make use of the mighty power of the media.
Remember that when you are trying to interest a journalist, a policy-maker or a decision-maker, you are a sales rep- representing a cross-disability organisation of people with disabilities. Every time you want to publicise an issue you need to identify.
Get to know about important people, associations and organisations, their policies and the ways decisions are made - by talking to people, watching televisions, listening to the radio, reading papers and magazines, asking for information.
What is being said about the issues that concern you? Who is most likely to be sympathetic to your cause? What happens at a Town or County Council meeting, in the Seanad or Dail? What national laws are being debated? What European and International (UN) directives, regulations, conventions and resolutions ahs the government ratified or supported? (To ratify is to agree to follow something that isn't automatically binding, such as a convention. Once ratified, a convention becomes part of national law.)
It might be useful to have one person in the Network to watch out for developments. Keep a file on people, organisations, laws and policies. Remember that things can changes quite quickly.