20 Nov 2012

“Choices and rights”, “Piss on pity”, “Access all areas” and “Nothing about us without us”.

Sometimes the personal gets political and the political gets really personal. This is what disabled people in Ireland have discovered since the onset of the current crisis. The rights of disabled people to even get up out of bed or go to the shops or to have a leaky roof over their heads, or for disabled children to have Special Needs Assistance in order to participate in main stream schooling, has been constantly seen by successive governments as a low lying fruit, ripe for the picking and throwing away onto a human compost heap of ‘unaffordable luxury’ in a time of ‘financial crisis’. This is set against a back drop of a hardening of public attitudes towards people, particularly children, with disability over the past five years as set down in the National Disability Authority report linked here. 
Disability Rights Coalition Ireland are holding a protest against the whittling away of disabled people’s rights by those in charge through a narrative of those rights as being ‘unaffordable’ , while dead banks are being given the right to screw every citizen in this country from a height. Disabled people are asking for their RIGHTS  to be honoured as set out in the 2011 election promises. These promises have been constantly broken. It takes place on Wednesday 21st November at the central Bank of Ireland at 2.00 pm and moves from there to the Dail.

‘The  disability movement invented terms like “choices and rights”, “piss on pity”, “access all areas” and “nothing about us without us”. Disability pride is about presenting ourselves as capable, confident, diverse citizens who are part of the universal experience of living. Notions of tragedy are contradicted by the movement saying, “We’re not super-crips overcoming challenges nor are we tragic heroes; rather we’re people just living our lives and we’re proud of who and what we are.”’
Disability Rights Coalition Ireland
Programme for Government promises pdf
Disability protests government u-turn thejournal.ie

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