The Government and State agencies need to do much more if they are to make public services accessible to people with disabilities, the director of the National Disability Authority said yesterday.
Ms Claire O'Connor said the issue of accessible services was "simply not on the agenda" for some public bodies, although others were beginning to make strides in removing the daily barriers which disabled people face.
"There are many barriers to be removed. Some are in the minds and behaviour of people. Other barriers surround us in the built and virtual environments in which we operate," she said at a conference in Co Offaly.
"There are pockets where things are really good and other places where it's simply not on the agenda. By exposing people to international best practice we are helping to show that they can improve access to services for people with disabilities through both short-term and long-term measures."
She declined to comment on whether the recently published Disability Bill would help improve access to services before the Estimates are published later this year.
Ms O'Connor was speaking following a conference in Tullamore yesterday, where international experts outlined their experiences in seeking to open up services to disabled people.
Mr David Capozzi, director of technical and information services at the US Access Board, told the conference that the Americans with Disabilities Act had played a key role in prompting employers to make their buildings accessible.
He said tax incentives were available for businesses which planned to remove barriers at their place of work, while lawsuits against large chains of businesses resulted in agreements to make improvements in building access across the country.
Mr Capozzi also said that, since the Act was introduced in 1990, it had resulted in the proportion of accessible public bus services increasing from 50 per cent to 93 per cent.
The economic incentives behind better public services were underlined by Mr Peter Barker of the UK Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee.
He said the disability community and its advocates needed to be better at selling the positive aspects of creating an inclusive environment.
"There are social benefits, cross-sector benefits and a business case for service-providers. In the UK the spending power of disabled people is some £40 billion per annum," he said.
The conference also heard how the Dutch government had worked to increase access to electronic information for people with disabilities and encouraged private firms to increase the accessibility of their websites.
