Madam, – I would like to support Deirdre Carroll’s call (Opinion, June 11th) for the Government to set up inspection for all services for people with disabilities at once – even if, to begin with, this is on a minimal scale.
Such inspection is particularly important for residential centres and would provide somewhere effective to receive complaints. It would be the best evidence that Ireland has learnt some of the lessons of the Ryan report.
I think the Michael Viney reports from 1966 which were republished from The Irish Timesarchive in Weekend Review (June 6th) should be reprinted in full. They give a good sense of the cost factors, uneasy acceptance of the system and the relative ineffectualness of the complaints that were made about the industrial schools in the 1960s.
– Yours, etc,
Madam, – Deirdre Carroll’s contribution to the debate on institutional abuse is both timely and welcome, as people with intellectual disabilities have been the perennial losers when it comes to justice.
Thus, the Commission on the Status of Persons with Disabilities (1996) led to improvements for those who were able to articulate their demands for rights; those with intellectual disabilities were, sadly, left behind and so, many remain in the unacceptable conditions described by Ms Carroll.
It is likely that, as the voices of those people who suffered atrocious abuse at the hands of religious and lay “carers” become increasingly heard and hopefully their demands for justice met, many people with intellectual disabilities will remain in situations of institutional and societal abuse.
As they look forward to their elder years, are we not further abusing them by expecting them to age and die in such a context?
Something must be done now. In TCD School of Nursing and Midwifery, we have been working closely with Amnesty Ireland, service providers, self-advocating people with intellectual disabilities, Inclusion Ireland and the National Institute for Intellectual Disabilities to form an umbrella group to bring together people who also feel that something must be done now.
I urge all like-minded individuals and groups to work with us to campaign for the rights of all people in Ireland who have intellectual disability.
– Yours, etc,