The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (“the Commission”) has today welcomed the launch of the ‘National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People 2025-2030’, but cautioned significant questions remain.
This strategy is the long-awaited successor to the ‘National Disability Inclusion Strategy 2017-2022.’ We welcome the consultation that was carried out in the Strategy development. However, although the Strategy contains many worthy objectives, a clear pathway for implementation is needed to ensure Ireland complies with its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).
It is particularly welcome that the Strategy makes reference to supporting meaningful and participatory stakeholder engagement with disabled people and representative groups and also commits to building the capacity of disabled persons organisations. It is imperative that disabled persons organisations are properly resourced and supported, through provision of core funding and other measures, to play a central role in delivery of any Strategy including monitoring its implementation.
However, we are concerned that the Strategy does not adequately address some key issues that are central to the realisation of the UNCRPD, including access to justice, inclusive education and the need to urgently address institutional safeguarding issues. The Strategy is not explicitly informed by disaggregated and publicly accessible core data that takes account of intersectional discrimination and this further inhibits its ability to enable realisation of the UNCRPD. Viewed on its own, the Strategy also does not include enough concrete actions and targeted measures to allow effective monitoring of implementation.
We reiterate our recent recommendations that measures are needed to address the systemic factors enabling violence and neglect in institutional and community settings, including steps taken to ensure professional and organisational accountability, oversight and inter-agency coordination, and to address failures in the criminal justice system, inspection bodies and the care system.
Although the Government provided the Commission with a statutory monitoring role on disability rights in 2023, the Strategy also does not expand on how IHREC's role as Independent Monitoring Mechanism ('IMM') will function within the Strategy. We believe clarity on our function as IMM will be crucial to enable informed and meaningful monitoring and reporting to disabled people and key bodies such as the UN, with the next full review of UNCRPD compliance due in 2027.
Chief Commissioner Liam Herrick said:
“In order to fully comply with the UNCRPD and ensure realisation of the rights of disabled people, the State needs to affect a seismic shift in the way it approaches disability. These rights belong to disabled people, our parents, children and friends, as well people in our communities. Disabled people have a right to live life to the full, and in order to do that we need to drastically change our collective approach to disability rights. While we welcome the common theme in the strategy regarding engagement and consultation with disabled people, what must follow is concrete action that will empower disabled peoples’ organisations to effectively engage with and communicate widely about issues of policy and practice. Ultimately, comprehensive, transformative change, properly and consistently resourced, is required to implement the UNCRPD in Ireland and this will require coordinated leadership across government departments, local authorities and public bodies.”
ENDS/
Notes to editors:
Institutionalisation
Current policy appears to be a tacit endorsement of institutionalisation, and we have concerns that the Strategy needs to be more robust in its actions and targets to address this. While we welcome the Strategy’s committed actions regarding community-based supports, housing and services - in the context of stagnated efforts to end institutionalisation there needs to be a concrete, ambitious and measurable commitment to these aims.
These should include including timelines and indicators to facilitate independent monitoring, and measures to progress systemic de-institutionalisation and to ensure that other forms of social care are subject to robust human rights-based oversight and safeguarding mechanisms.
The Farrelly Commission
The Strategy commits to ‘identify learnings from the Farrelly Commissions findings’* and ‘develop a new policy on adult safeguarding in the health and social care sector’, however there is no indication of what concrete actions will be taken towards creating a safer environment for people who live in or use health and social care settings.
This is despite the Commission making clear to the Government last month** that the State’s failure to safeguard disabled people in congregated settings and institutional care requires an urgent and comprehensive response, including through legislation to protect the rights of people deprived of their liberty and though human-rights based reform of mental health law.
Having ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2018 – the last EU member state to do so – this is the State’s first (comprehensive) plan to implement the Convention.