REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE AHEAD INAUGURAL LECTURE SERIES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE AHEAD INAUGURAL LECTURE SERIES ‘DISABILITY AND CONTEMPORARY IRELAND’
Tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith i bhur measc inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh don fáilte a raibh fíor agus flaithiúil.
It gives me great pleasure to be here today to deliver the inaugural address for AHEAD, the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability. My thanks to Professor John Kelly for his kind invitation and to each of you for your warm welcome.
AHEAD combines two themes that are very close to my heart, education and people with disabilities. Education is the doorway to opportunity for all of us. It is an open secret that the basic building block of the Celtic Tiger economy was the widening of access to free second-level education and the huge demand it created for third level education. The new energy and imagination unlocked by that seminal change in Irish life provoked the most remarkable period of achievement in the history of our country – economically, politically, socially and culturally.
Ireland has gone from darkness to light in little more than a generation and today we have a problem solving generation par excellence. It’s just as well for there are still plenty of problems to be solved, not least the question of how we ensure that those Irish citizens who are living with disabilities can move coherently from enduring life in all its obstacles to enjoying life in all its fullness. We all know, without being told, that education is one of the important keys to answering that question. But that little word ‘access’ raises very complex issues in the case of people with disabilities for there is a web of attitudes, practices, presumptions, rules and structures which make the line from disability to education, and especially third level education, anything but straight. So many doorkeepers hold keys to the access doors – and the disabled have to negotiate and navigate eachone much more painstakingly than those without disability.
A special thank you to John Kelly who over 20 years has been active on this issue. Our paths were linked when I was in Trinity and he was supportive in the establishment of the first ever Fulbright Scholarship for a profoundly deaf student.
AHEAD is one of the organisations working to straighten that path and it has to be said that the old days of silent stoicism from the disability sector have long since metamorphosed, thankfully, into a full volume advocacy which is slowly but surely replacing the old days of isolation and invisibility.
A few weeks ago I visited Syracuse University in upstate New York, an institution with a considerable reputation in the field of access for the disabled. A friend of mine is Professor of Disability law there. He was born profoundly deaf and his parents, like mine around the same era, were told by the then experts that their son could never hope to blossom intellectually. ‘When he grows up, apprentice him to a low grade trade’, they were told. Luckily his more intelligent parents ignored the experts and followed their own instincts, so that today this erudite man has a Doctorate in law and speaks many languages. But for how many other disabled children were expectations lowered all around them, and inside themselves, for how many others is third-level education still a far-off aspiration. Yes, in this generation, we have seen times and attitudes and ambitions change within the disabled community and, yes, we have evidence of a new spirit, a new momentum capable of achieving genuine integration in contemporary Ireland, but we should be under no illusion about the distance yet to travel.
Forgive me if I stick with illustrations from the deaf community – I do so because it is the one I know most intimately over a lifetime. Only in the past two decade has any profoundly deaf-from-birth student been admitted to an Irish university – acalamitous reality that speaks of systematic failure and not lack of personal efforts. The very kind of systematic failure that provoked the setting up of Ahead. If you or I decide we want to do a ten-week evening course in say Art or Computers next autumn at the usual modest cost of, say 100 euro, it is a simple process. If you are deaf and can communicate best by sign language, it will cost you 1,500 euro to employ a sign language interpreter to accompany you to the course, that is if you can find one. So the deaf stay home – effectively overlooked by the whole education sector.
In so many deeply embedded and insidious ways our disabled citizens find themsleves in cul de sacs which are frustrating and dispiriting. It is not so long ago that I met a young man who was wheelchair bound and had applied to do medicine, but had been rejected even though he had straight As in all his exams. The reason he was excluded was that the buildings he would need to access as a medical student were unsuited to wheelchairs. How many disabled have the same experience – they have excelled, they have achieved, they have all the qualificatin by the dorr still won’t open.
I would like to share with you a quote from the report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities:
‘Education is not just schooling. Education is a process of sharing, developing, building, strengthening, encouraging and recognising the abilities of people. The person is central to all. Education shares and respects diversity. Its aim is to enhance and enable the person to achieve his or her own goals.’
There is another quotation that matters here – it comes from our own Constitution which seeks ‘to promote the common good …. so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured (and) true social order attained …’. Access to education is at the very heart of the dignity and freedom of the individual. Take a look around the world – where there is educational poverty, there is endemic poverty. Take a look at our own country where it is those who are education poor who are most likely to be on the margins, spectators at the feast that is today’s Ireland. Every single person on those margins is a challenge to us and, sadly, the disabled are over-represented there. In a society where not all have the same advantages – socially, economically or culturally – it is imperative that our education system does not carry the virus of ongoing disempowerment but rather is the very radical space in which individuals are motivated, encouraged, helped and supported to blossom to their fullest potential.
The lead taken by the higher education sector in recent years is very reassuring. Disability officers, access programmes and cross-community partnerships are now firmly embedded in the culture of our universities and institutes of technology, reshaping thinking, reshaping action. The move away from segregated education to mainstream education is another healthy sign of a more integrated, sensitive and effective world to come. There is a critical mass of ambitious children and young adults with disability forming and we have to ensure that world is ready for them. Their confident, articulate parents will be much less expert-blinded than in the past. The children will see themselves as part of the mainstream, not as the kids who come from the special schools that other kids do not know how to relate to. The young adults will have been guided by teachers and career guidance counsellors who come from the ‘you can do it’ school of thought and not from the ‘you can’t because …’ school of thought. Our people will have grown up in a world where disability legislation, equality legislation will have formed their views and sharpened their awareness.
Right here and now, unemployment rates for people with a disability, including graduates, remain much greater than for their non-disabled peers. That tells us the old barriers are still holding more firm than we would like. Thankfully, commendable work is being done to identify and challenge the barriers to recruitment of graduates with disabilities in order to bring about reform. Organisations such as AHEAD and FÁS are pioneering initiatives to support young people with disabilities entering the workforce and to encourage employers to play their part in bringing about greater equality and career opportunities for people with disabilities. I particularly welcome Ireland’s first graduate fair specifically for graduates and students with disabilities.
As a society we have been educated, over and over again, by the disabled themselves, who have unpacked our perceptions and prejudices and shown us just how wasteful and endlessly frustrating they are. It can be very difficult for people unfamiliar with disability to appreciate the unnecessary mountains the disabled have to climb, on an almost daily basis, mountains that could be levelled with a modicum of thought and of careful planning. Yet we know from the remarkable culture of voluntarism that flourishes in Ireland that there is such a passion for fairness, a passion to rectify injustice, a passion to put joy into life. These things tell us that the momentum for a society in which the disabled live lives as independent and fulfilled as is humanly possible is unstoppable because it is only when we arrive at that Ireland that we can say we have completed the ideal of our Republic.
This lecture series will, I hope, accelerate the pace of our journey towards that republic and I congratulate and thank all those who are working so hard within voluntary and statutory sectors to make Ireland a showcase of inclusion for those with disability. The days of benign paternalism are disappearing and a new era of direct advocacy is already upon us. It is a sign that the confidence of today’s Ireland is permeating the sectors which have been most excluded and that they are fuelled by a righteous ambition to be tomorrow’s professionals, politicians, poets or whatever their hearts desire. The best part of the journey is yet to come and with the help of AHEAD, we will achieve a country to be proud of for both disabled and non-disabled alike.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.