Was yesterday "the most important day since the foundation of the State" for people with disabilities? The words are those of Mr Paddy Doyle, chief executive of the National Representative Council which represents 2,000 people with disabilities. He was welcoming the announcement that services for people with disabilities will, from January, be provided by the same institutions which serve everybody else.
Employment and training services, for example, will move from the Department of Health and Children to FAS. Information and advocacy services will move from the National Rehabilitation Board to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs. A National Disability Authority will replace the National Rehabilitation Board. Sixty per cent of the members of the authority will be people with disabilities or - in the case of those with mental handicaps - their parents or carers.
The NDA will advise the Government on policy. It will also develop codes of practice for bodies providing services to people with disabilities. It will monitor the implementation - or non-implementation - of these standards. And it will make a report to the Oireachtas every year. Mr Doyle is right in his enthusiasm in the sense that yesterday's announcement marks an important turning on a long road. Up to comparatively recently, people with disabilities were institutionalised and given little or no say in their own future.
In the 1970s one of the first stirrings of dissent from among disabled people themselves came with the establishment of a small campaigning group in Dublin. The 1980s and 1990s have seen disabled people organise effectively to take more control of their own lives. Yesterday saw a desegregation of services for people with disabilities, and people with disabilities put in the driving seat on the new authority.
What matters now is what the authority, and the disability movement, actually do with this new opportunity. It is vital that it is seen to tackle the many, many obstacles which remain in the way of people with disabilities. These include a sheer lack of services for many; the physical inaccessibility of streets, roads, premises and transport; the serious shortage of residential care places for people being cared for by elderly, frail parents, let alone for others; the serious difficulties which people with disabilities have in competing for work, difficulties which often arise from prejudice; and many others.
Despite the difficulties there was an air of celebration yesterday, with praise going in the direction of the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Ms Mary Wallace. In her year in office, Ms Wallace has, with determination, built on the foundations laid down by her predecessor, Mr Mervyn Taylor, who had the advantage of a seat at the Cabinet table. Even without that advantage, Ms Wallace has seen considerable extra amounts of funding put into disability; she has got legislation banning discrimination in workplaces on to the statute books; and she appears to have won a measure of trust from a disability movement which has every reason to be cynical.
Like her counterpart in the Department of Health and Children, Mr Frank Fahey, she has taken the potentially powerless role of Minister of State and is using it to achieve things. That she has done so in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is a tribute to her astuteness and to her Minister, Mr O'Donoghue. But as to whether Mr Paddy Doyle is right and yesterday was the most important day ever for people with disabilities, only that cold and heartless judge, time, will tell.