OPINION/Fintan O'Toole: It is easy, in this intimate society, to believe that everybody in power has good intentions and that all our leaders, however inadequate, are trying their best. A soft, gentle language has been poured like golden honey over political discourse.
No one in power ever admits to anything other than compassion, concern and a genuine determination to make life better for the little people. The melody of niceness drifts in the air like Muzak, lulling us into resignation.
Now and then, however, the mask slips and the sneer of true contempt appears before us. In the world of intellectual debate, a deep disdain for people with disabilities broke the surface with Mary Ellen Synon's infamous Sunday Independent rant.
In the world of legal and political discourse, it has emerged with the Government's breathtakingly contemptuous Disability Bill, a piece of legislation which is arguably even more insulting.
People with disabilities make up about a tenth of the State's population. Without a serious, coherent framework of law, guaranteeing equal access to public space, education, transport and social services, they are in a very real sense second-class citizens.
For many years now, they and their families have been looking for legislation which will grant them effective citizenship. Their long struggle for simple equality was expected to culminate in a Disability Act which was promised as part of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Programme for Government. What has finally emerged is a carefully drafted sneer, a polished, beautifully-judged exercise in ridicule.
Somebody must have taken pleasure, for example, in framing the provisions on access to transport. The joke is set up with a deadpan declaration that trains run by a State company must be accessible to people with disabilities.
What you think is the punchline is delivered with a Jack Dee-like poker-face: they will be accessible by 2015.
But the real stroke of genius is still to come: the railway platforms will be accessible by 2020. You wait 13 years for the train to come and then discover that you can't get into the station for another five.
Even the tears of sardonic laughter, however, cannot blind any reader of the Bill to the fact that its main thrust is actually to water down rights that disabled people already have.
Previous legislation like the Employment Equality Act and the Equal Status Act does give people with disabilities some basic rights. The main point of the Disability Bill, on the other hand, is to make it clear to the courts that all such rights are contingent on the needs of the authorities. They are not, in other words, rights at all.
The Bill is like a game of snakes and ladders in which at the top of every ladder there is a snake. The ladders are nice statements about what should happen. The snakes are escape hatches which make it clear that public bodies have no real responsibilities to make it happen.
For people with disabilities, for example, the most important single requirement for decent treatment is an independent assessment of their health and education needs which the authorities have to act on. The Bill nods in this direction by giving people the right to apply to their health board for an assessment.
It then, however, immediately withdraws this right, by giving the health board the right not to make the assessment, saying: "A health board may dispense with an assessment of need if, in its opinion, the health service concerned is required urgently or such an assessment is otherwise inappropriate in the circumstances of the particular case."
And just in case any autistic child or visually impaired person somehow manages not to fall down this hole, the Bill provides a huge patch of quicksand.
Even if you do get your assessment of needs, the health board concerned "shall take such steps as are reasonable to provide the service as soon as practicable and to the greatest practicable extent."
Do they really think we're all so charmed by our lovely leaders that we don't know what the qualifiers "reasonable" and "practicable" mean in a piece of legislation?
Everybody knows that they function in a passage of legalese in exactly the same way that the little word "not" functions in any ordinary sentence. This is Wayne's World politics: you guys in wheelchairs have rights (pause, snigger) - NOT!
It gradually dawns on you reading the Bill that its main function is not to enshrine the rights of people of disabilities to full citizenship but to protect the State and public bodies from nuisances like Kathryn Sinnott, Annie Ryan and Marie O'Donoghue who take them to court.
And then, just as you're beginning to think that even this Government wouldn't be so brazen, there it is, section 47: "Nothing in this Act shall confer a right of action in any civil proceedings by reason only of a failure by a public body to comply with any duty imposed on it under this Act."
Yes, they are that brazen. They think that the public capacity for outrage is so diminished that they can mock people with disabilities and call it progressive legislation.
A public meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin tonight, hosted by all the main disability groups, will be a good indication of whether they're right to be so smug.