It’s been a year since I wrote how the opening ceremony of the Paralympics reaffirmed my faith in humanity. At the time our beloved HSE were trying to take away Personal Assistant funding from a group of people with disabilities. Let’s just say that was a wrong fight to pick with such a politically intelligent group of people. They were fearless. Who wants to be a Government Minister with a gang of politically motivated ‘special folk’ sleeping outside the Dáil?
That should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. For some bizarre reason those in permanent power in this country have decided that cutting direct services to people with disabilities and their families was to be the way out of our current interesting economic time. Forget ministerial and TD pensions. Forget going after banks. Forget going after any excess spending on gatherings and the such. We’ll go after the crips.
The result is we are beginning to hear about cuts in respite care, cuts in day care, cuts in Special Needs Assistant hours, cuts in anything you are having yourself. Ah sure, the parents will look after them.
Parents. Until very recently, the image of a parent of a child with a disability was of a slightly older parent whose whole day was spent by providing love and care to their child. Time for the fight and protesting was a luxury many just could not afford and the system knew it. They ground these elderly parents down so any kind of service was seen as manna from heaven.
This is changing.
The new generation of parents would be seen as a marketing man’s dreams. ABC1 all the way. They have also grown up with disabled friends. They’ve had disabled brothers, sisters or cousins. They would have seen their parents struggle with the ‘system’. Like all parents they love their children. They know their children were not the cause of the downturn. And they are determined that their children will not carry an unporportional share of the burden of saving the country.
That small glimmer of hope gives me hope. It’s been a tough year for Irish disabled people and their families but we’re still here. We’re still fighting. We won’t go away.
Who knows, we might just save Ireland too. The revolution may even start here!
Image: ©INPHO/Morgan Treacy
