The recent concession allowing civil actions does not disguise the Disabilities Bill's inadequacy, argues Siobhán Long
Mary Wallace has shuffled uncomfortably in her shoes all week. Her long-awaited Disabilities Bill, released quietly on December 21st, has finally been on the receiving end of a series of incendiary attacks, both from disabled people themselves and from organisations in the voluntary sector providing disability services.
Finally these two groups, whose priorities should coincide more often than diverge, have come to a consensus on the fundamental question of rights. Not simply disability rights, but human rights.
Because this Disabilities Bill does everything it can to undermine human rights in a way that suggests the Government has been selective in responding to the 402 recommendations of the 1996 "Report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities: A Strategy For Equality".
So the Minister has acquiesced on the question of immunity from suit. Section 47 (civil liability) sought to ensure that the disability-related legal actions taken by Kathryn Sinnot, Mary O'Donoghue and many others would become a thing of the past.
Ms Wallace finally admitted that denying disabled people the right to take civil action against a public body which fails to deliver services is akin to giving an athlete a pair of shoes without laces, for fear that they'd actually assist that individual to cross the finish line.
At the public meeting in the Mansion House on Tuesday night, Séamus Greene, of the National Parents and Siblings Alliance, implored the public not to accept what he called the Minister's "Judas kiss".
Her miserly attempt to win back the support of disabled people on this single question of civil action is breathtaking in its arrogance.
Four long years of consultation with disability groups, but was the Minister listening?
Seemingly not, since she's chosen to ignore their central tenet: disability law is about rights, not duties. It's about equal status, not superior status.
It's about having a place at the table and not accepting the crumbs that have thus far been deemed sufficient to keep disabled people in their place: on the margins, without access to adequate education, employment opportunities, transport and housing.
For example, why should an individual who requires a personal assistant to enable them to live independently have to be satisfied with a skeleton service? As John Dolan, of the Disability Federation of Ireland, remarked at Tuesday's meeting: "Leftovers are not the thing that citizenship is made of."
As an employee of a voluntary organisation which delivers services to disabled people, this Bill offers little to suggest that the chronic underfunding of disability services is going to change. The physical and sensory disability sector has already told the Government that its funding deficit for this year alone amounts to €38 million.
The December Budget allocated a sum of IR£5.1 million (€6.5 million) to address that gap - amounting to one-sixth of the required funding. If services are already so chronically under-resourced, how can they possibly deliver on the long-awaited and much-vaunted "Assessment of Need" promised by the Disabilities Bill?
Ms Wallace has been careful not to mention any additional resources which would ensure that disabled people, once their needs have been assessed, would receive those services. So her focus has been to enshrine in law a beginning and an end without a middle.
A person can have their needs assessed, can have recourse to a complaints officer if those needs aren't met, but can do nothing about the fact that so many services either don't exist or are delivered under such acute funding restrictions that they are only available to the few, or to those who resign themselves to waiting in line.
Furthermore, despite the Strategy For Equality Report's call for a one-stop shop where disabled people could have their educational, employment, social and health needs addressed coherently and collaboratively, this Disabilities Bill seeks to send people on a merry-go-round of the Ombudsman, the National Disability Authority, the Equality Authority and the Department of Education and Science.
Is it possible to imagine an environment riper for buck-passing than this? So much for the seamless services that disabled people have sought for so long.
The heavy hand of the Department of Finance can be felt throughout this Disabilities Bill. It excels in its minute attention to the detail of administrative procedures. But it fails miserably to address the key question of service delivery. Its definition of services encompasses health only and blithely ignores the plethora of any individual's requirements: schooling, housing, employment, transport etc.
Until Ms Wallace provides a rights-based piece of legislation, her efforts will never be worth more than the paper they're written on.
This Bill not only fails to deliver, it actually erodes gains already made in the area of mainstreaming. Why, for example, should building regulations (already enshrined in law but rarely enforced) need to be repeated in a Disabilties Bill?
The Disabilities Bill is long on Health Board duties of care and short on rights: human rights. Better no law than a bad law.
Siobhán Long works with Enable Ireland as manager of their Eastern Regional Assistive Technology Service