REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ‘DISABILITY - ACCESS AND ATTITUDES’ FORUM ÁRAS AN UACHTARÁIN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ‘DISABILITY - ACCESS AND ATTITUDES’ FORUM ÁRAS AN UACHTARÁIN THURSDAY, 19 JUNE 2008
Dia dhíbh a chairde go léir agus fáílte chuig Áras an Uachtaráin inniu.
You are all very welcome to the Áras this morning. We have a great group of diverse, energetic people here with the aim of furthering an ongoing national debate around disability and our collective journey as a people towards being a place where every single person can, without unnecessary difficulty, realise their full potential.
In a corridor of the Áras stands a bust of President Roosevelt, the International Disability Award, which I accepted at the UN in 1999 on behalf of Ireland for our commitment to the full and equal participation of people with disabilities in Irish society. We knew then, as we know now, that while much has changed for the better for those with disabilities, the best has yet to come and that will only come as a result of maintaining a vigorous and ambitious debate at every level of civic society.
This house has its own interesting story to tell for, like so many houses of its era, its builders paid little or no attention to the needs of people with mobility problems. Now, as it approaches the latter end of its third century, it has just undergone a large-scale accessibility programme. In fact it would have been impossible to host a forum like this until the completion of this most recent of access programmes. I have no doubt that more work will be undertaken here in the years ahead as the experienced voices of users reshape our imagination time and again.
Quite a few years back I met the moderator of today’s forum, Professor Michael Schwartz, a man who himself has reshaped many people’s thinking on disability issues. He was the first profoundly deaf person to be the keynote speaker at any conference on any subject in the then 150-year-old history of Queen’s University Belfast, back in the 1990s and I can say that those of us privileged to be there on that occasion would be unanimous in our view that we were electrified. That address changed the trajectory of deaf education on this island - a place where, until then, no profoundly deaf from birth person had ever studied at third level in an Irish University. Michael’s parents, like the parents of so many other deaf and indeed otherwise disabled children, had been told to expect little of him intellectually, for not so terribly long ago outrageously ignorant attitudes to disability even among - and often especially among - professionals, made assumptions which shut those with disability off from the best of educational and training opportunities and forced them to settle for second best.
Michael was blessed with parents who set a fresh and radical educational agenda for their son. Today he is Director of the Disability Rights Clinic in Syracuse University’s College of Law and as such is at the very forefront of disability studies and disability advocacy in the United States. We are delighted that he has brought his formidable personal story, his academic excellence and his effectiveness as a communicator to our forum. To him and his wife Patricia who is also his interpreter, a big welcome.
And a huge welcome to each one of you. This is a day for your voices not mine, your ideas, your hunches, experiences, ambitions, ideas, for these are the seeds with which we will plant Ireland’s future. We want that future to be a place where the oppressive and discouraging attitudes and obstacles of the past are in the past. We want the future to be an open landscape, deeply disability-sensitive and spontaneously encouraging of the talents, skills and rightful ambitions of all its children - a place as the Proclamation says, where the children of the nation are cherished equally. To get to that future we need good and careful and experienced guides like you. I wish you every success in your discussions today and thank you all very much for coming.
And now, back to you, Michael.