OPPOSITION POLITICAL parties have called on the Government to move quickly to provide modern community-based accommodation for thousands of people with disabilities living in outdated institutions.
This follows the recommendations of an unpublished report commissioned by the Health Service Executive (HSE) which proposes closing all 72 institutions for disabled people because they are flouting residents’ basic rights.
The HSE’s high-level working group proposed that institutions, or “congregated settings” with 10 residents or more, should be replaced by supported or independent placements in the community.
Fine Gael MEP Mairéad McGuinness said the study should be published urgently to help progress the move towards more appropriate forms of community-based care.
“People with disabilities want to have choices in how and where they live. They are rightly demanding that they be supported to live in communities, not institutions,” she said.
Ms McGuinness also said Ireland stood in “self-imposed isolation” among most EU states in delaying ratification of an international agreement to give equal rights to people with disabilities.
“While Ireland signed the UN Convention on Disability in 2007, it still remains to be ratified, the step that would give legal effect to the convention in Ireland.
“This convention commits countries to introducing legal rights to education, healthcare and work opportunities, and abolishing legislation, customs and practices that discriminate against people with a disability,” she said.
Labour’s Seanad spokeswoman on health and social protection, Senator Phil Prendergast, said it was clear that the care system for intellectual disabilities was still a shambles “25 years after a strategy was developed to give these patients the treatment they need”.
She said the report, published in The Irish Timesyesterday, revealed that basic entitlements such as privacy and dignity were not being protected in these settings.
“For instance, one institution has just a single accessible shower and two-wash basins for 20 older, severely disabled people,” Mrs Prendergast said.
The report, Time to Move on from Congregated Settings: A Strategy for Inclusion, had come to light just weeks after other highly critical reports regarding care for people with psychiatric problems.
Progress in improving accommodation in many cases was dependent on selling off land to build more modern services, Mrs Prendergast said. However, these were destined to remain stalled due to the collapsed property market.
“Contrast this with the plan for developing care services for property developers. Nama was implemented immediately with a limitless margin of error in its budget.
“So long as the Government continues prioritising care for developers over care for patients then the plan to extend basic human rights to intellectually disabled and mental patients will never be realised,” she said.
