One of the lesser-known aspects of the Belfast Agreement is its commitment to securing equality of opportunity for people with disabilities in Northern Ireland. Specifically, it promotes a right to equal opportunity in all social and economic activity, "regardless of class, creed, disability, gender or ethnicity".
This pledge may have gone unnoticed by the wider world, but it will not go unnoticed for long. Northern Ireland has a growing disability rights movement which can be depended on to take this pledge and make it work in the interests of people whom society is too ready to disregard if allowed. Indeed, a concern of disability activists in Northern Ireland is that when the planned Equality Commission replaces the Disability Council, the Fair Employment Commission and various other bodies, it will be so focused on dealing with discrimination on religious grounds that disability issues will go to the end of the queue.
That said, the sort of broad commitment to equality of opportunities for people with disabilities included in the Belfast Agreement is something we could learn from in the Republic. Legislation banning discrimination against disabled people in the Republic is likely to be implemented within the next twelve months but disability activists in the South regard it as rather weak.
The undertaking in the Belfast Agreement could only be matched in the South by a Disabilities Act or by a Constitutional amendment. Pressure for such change will grow in the South if the disability provisions of the Belfast Agreement are made to work.
This is not all that the Republic can learn from the North. There is no doubt that provision for people with disabilities in Northern Ireland is far ahead of that in the Republic. Day services, respite care and residential services are available in Northern Ireland to an extent which can only be looked upon with envy by many families in the Republic - and some of the financial benefits in Northern Ireland are markedly superior.
There is a core difference between the way the services are organised in the two jurisdictions. In the North, services are provided mainly by the State. In the South they are provided to a large extent by big voluntary organisations and religious orders, though financed by the State. What has been going on in recent decades could be seen as a struggle to pressurise the State into meeting its responsibilities fully by providing the funding to bring services up to a basic, satisfactory level. This pressure has often involved hard and exhausting work by parents' groups and has succeeded in improving matters to an extent.
The Republic has seen much change in the field of disabilities in recent years. The National Disability Authority which is still at a preparatory stage can consolidate that change and bring it further.
But while disability groups in the North may have something to learn in terms of assertiveness from the South, the fact is that the disability movement in the South has had to put a lot of energy into campaigning for services that are taken for granted in the North. For these reasons, both sides have much to gain from cross-Border co-operation in the disability field.