Madam, – David Egan (June 12th) suggests the best residence for disabled people is in the community. As a person now with severe physical disabilities living in social housing, I wonder has anyone who deals with disabled people – county council housing department, community services, the HSE or families – considered the great impact that keeping decision-making out of disabled people’s control or input, has for those of us who are labelled “disabled”?
Needing re-housing due to the severity of my multiple difficulties, I am being removed from my home street of 15 years by the county council, even though a suitable downstairs apartment has become free there. With nine medical points out of 10 on the scale of urgency, the only thing mitigating against me obtaining that home the council calls it a “unit”, is it is a two-bedroomed “unit” – yet I already have a two-bedroom unit that was given to me on medical grounds originally. They want to deprive me of a much-needed second room, which present medical submissions say is necessary.
Because I may not need home care at night right now, I am to be moved out of the area to a completely unknown community. I am being offered a place a considerable distance away from all I have known and grew up in for the past 50-plus years. Care at night will become inevitable. All medical support submissions have been ignored and if I do need the night care, and they place me in a one- bedroom unit now, they would have to move me again.
Mr Egan helpfully reminds us that choosing where we live and with whom we live is a human right as set out in Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. At my age (nearly 60) it is hardly humane to be so uncaringly shifted from place to place and have no say whatsoever. I face the prospect of settling into this new community, establishing new roots, only to be uprooted again perhaps in only a couple of years or less. This is the nightmare of social housing.
My traumatic ongoing experience of trying to be rehoused in a suitable “unit” in my own community with suitable care has brought me to believe if you are disabled or mentally compromised in the Irish Republic you are at the mercy of just about every State and semi- State body. You have no say in anything.
You can try to have a say, but from my experience you will not be listened to. I feel totally unheard, dismissed and relegated to the back and beyond, without any respect or consideration.
I never for an instant considered Ireland as either holy or democratic. Recent weeks testify to this fact. – Yours, etc,