 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome you all to this event on the subject of disability and sustainable development, integrating policy into national realities from a disabled person's organization, DPO perspective. I'm really pleased that our speaker will be Dr James Casey. James currently works for the Independent Living Movement Ireland as a policy advisor. I can also confirm that the Independent Living Movement ILMI launched a very excellent website yesterday, which I'd like to draw everybody's attention to. This is our third event of three in this mini-series on disability policy at the IIEA, the first time we've done this. Our previous events are available on our website. I'll draw attention to the fact that ISL interpretation and closed captioning are both available for this event. James is going to talk to Dr Vivian Rath who has chaired each of these events for us. Viv is an award-winning human rights advocate, a research and policy officer with a head and an adjunct teaching fellow at Trinity College Dublin. I'm also delighted. The last thing I have to say is another feather in Viv's cap is that Viv has just finished a paper with the Institute, which is going to be published on Friday, which you can see some details of it on your screens. Viv's paper provides an introduction to disability policy in Ireland and across the EU with a review of some key policies that are being implemented with a view to improving the lives of disabled people. The paper also reviews the contribution that engagement and higher education can have in supporting political participation and participation in decision-making amongst persons with disabilities. It concludes by considering how policymakers can include disabled people in decisions that concern them. It's a very excellent paper. I'm delighted we have it and I commend it to the House and for everyone who would like to read it. Now further ado, just again to thank Viv and James and indeed our ISL interpreter. A hand over to you, Viv. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion. Thank you very much, Barry. It is lovely to be here again for the third seminar of this series and that I would just like to begin today by congratulating the IIEA for launching this inaugural series on disability and working to mainstream disability issues within the wider scope of their other series. It has been a pleasure to work with the team here and I was only too delighted when IIEA and Barry asked me to write an introductory paper on disability and I'm really pleased to know that the IIEA hoped to explore some of the teams in next year. So now without further ado and enough talk out of me, let's hear, start to hear something about our guest today. Well, we have a very exciting guest and because and in line with International Day for Persons with Disabilities, which was the third of December, the IIEA are celebrating it. And who better to celebrate it than a person from the independent living movement of Ireland. So again, as with all of the three seminars, the disabled person's voice is at the heart of the seminars. So the theme for International Day for Persons with Disabilities was united in action to rescue and achieve the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, far with and by persons with disabilities. And our guest, Dr. James Casey, will, through his presentation today, discuss that further. Now, just some housekeeping rules. We will begin today with the keynote address and then there will be approximately 20 minutes or so for questions and answers with you, the audience. And we really love to hear your voice and the more questions we have, the more interesting and deeper that discussion is. You will be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they come to you and we will come to them later. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter or X using the handle at IIEA. And I would also like to draw to your attention that we have also have Irish Sign Language here today and please make sure to pin that on your screen. I also want you to note that we have closed captions and of course all of this will be recorded and put up on YouTube for later. So now, finally, Dr. James Casey. Well, James currently works for the Independent Living Movement of Ireland as a policy advisor. He previously worked on the Onside Project. He holds a PhD in Critical Disability Studies from the University of Galway, where he was the recipient of a doctoral teaching fellowship. He is a disabled person and has worked as a lecturer, disability equality consultant and communication worker in addition to his continued role as peer reviewer with several international journals. James, I could now ask you to take the floor and to deliver your presentation. Thank you very much. Thanks very much Vivian and thanks very much to Barry and everybody in Chemis within the IIEA and it's a wonderful thing to see and I think that it's a momentous occasion and the series of lecturers bringing disability policy into the mainstream. Thanks. It's a huge paradigm shift and we can't underestimate that. And I think probably that's probably going to be the theme of today that my brief talk is going to be about. And please feel free to ask me any questions or clarify anything. I'm from Mayo, so I have that big pick accent and slightly frustrated head on me. So please do apologize for that. Today, we're going to talk about two things and I think they're not mutually exclusive. Both of them are connected and very much so. And I think both of those things are more germane today than they have ever been in our contemporary moment. One is the Sustainable Development Goals. And the other one is how disabled people and disability rights movement are interacting with those Sustainable Development Goals and how both frameworks can complement each other. But also how has it been done and some of the challenges to achieving both of those? I suppose I'll say a little bit about, first of all, to foreground who we are and what we do in independent movement Ireland or ILMI. If you want to go to our website. We are a disability rights organization, a disabled people's organization, as it's called. And a disabled people's organization, DPO, is an organization made up for and of disabled people for, you know, making sure the policy is shaped by us. It affects us so it needs to be shaped by us. We've been around for 35 years since nearly 1990s. We reshaped and reformed in 2017, 2018 and went from CIL, Centre for Independent Living, to Independent Living Movement Ireland, disabled persons organization. We're a cross impairment organization. I know that sounds, what is a cross impairment organization? That means all different type of disabilities or impairments. So we don't just represent one type of person, we represent everyone. And we do that by collective consultation. If we're going to create a policy paper, position paper or response, any issue that we hold spaces for that. And that's something that we're very honored to be able to do and very honored to be able to take part in. The importance of DPOs is huge. Ireland is at a critical point in its future. This talk today is quite interesting because on Monday I was at the Coalition 2030's plenary meeting in Dublin. Coalition 2030 is a group of 70 plus organizations that want to advance the Sustainable Development Goals in Ireland, civil society organizations. And I think even more than ever the Sustainable Development Goals are ready to go. They're important. We've seen in the last few weeks a whole strain of the social contract in Ireland and across many countries. Whether that's critical issues such as environmental justice, social justice, going down to the issues of housing, etc. And we need to reinvestigate that. We need to reassess that. But there is a framework there. The framework is Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals. They're agreed by every country within the United Nations with a few. Each one of them goals can be quite widespread. For instance, no poverty, eliminating discrimination, clean energy, clean water, technological advances, reducing inequality, etc. Healthy and inclusive communities. The framework is there. It's a good framework, but it's always under threat. And we can see that even what's happening in COP in Dubai at the moment where you have a talk about our future, about our shared collective future as humans and this planet and how we interact with our climate and our planet, our home. So how does disability work into that? Well, in many ways, even in the global context before I go back to the national context, the most people affected by climate change in the world are going to be disabled people, usually in the global south. Most of those are living in rural areas and most of those are women. So disabled people are going to be affected by climate change just as much as anyone else, not only just in Northern Hemisphere, but also in the Southern Hemisphere. But for often a lot of the time too, whereas the Sustainable Development Goals do other things bar just climate change. They talk about social justice. They talk about equality and equity of rights. Additionally, they talk about climate change and environmental justice, which is a huge issue. And up to this point, more often than not, disabled people have left out of that conversation about climate change. Several reasons for that. We've always been seen as an energy burden or eliminate from the discourse. Climate change and social justice are linked. You cannot want both of them. And both of those two have to be seen as part of the same piece, if you want, if you so will. So if we look at the solutions to climate change, it's reduced in inefficiency and energy. That's good for everybody. It's more public transport. That's good for everybody. It's better sustainable, livable communities. That's better for everybody. It's a distribution of, you know, actual wealth on that route. That's better for everybody. If we look at disabled people as a global community and national community, we can see draw parallels between disabled people and the environmental justice movement. Disabled people are against a large sector. A lot of the time we think of disabled people as either hidden or not part for societies. And that's a narrative that probably is outdated. And I think the big idea of disability to foreground before I go on to talk about the CRPD, which is the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People, is to talk about the traditional view of disability and the modern view of disability or the contemporary view of disability. So getting our head around this paradigm shift, how we think about disabled people and impairment and disability and intersectionality is crucial to understanding what's to come. Up till about 17, you know, 80 years ago, disability was very much seen in the context of Darwinism, in the context of functional and psychological limitations. We go on further, we can see the effects of that Darwinism, that embodiment. In about the 1970s, this idea came about through various fora. I'm not going to go on about where it originated, but it seemed to happen conjunctionally in the US as also in Europe. And disabled activists were becoming more aware of the role of society. They were seeing how other equality movements were being developed, whether that's the women's rights movement, LGBT movement, people of color movement. And it became a conversation about what is our place in society. So up to this point, we had an issue called the medical model of disability. And the medical model of disability exists still. The medical model of disability situates disability as functional or intellectual, psychological, physical or emotional limitation. And it situates all the problem of disability in the whole person itself. So it's a subjective condition that your place in society is determined about how you can interact with society. If you cannot interact with society, then the issue is down to you. So the difference between an impairment and impairment to the functional limitation and disability is not shown. Then came a big idea called the social model of disability. And this is the big idea of disability. This is the big equality idea of disability. This idea, well, first of all, it's lovely and it's elegant and it's very nuanced. And it's a way of thinking about disability that hasn't occurred before. I know many people have probably heard of the social model or they're aware of the social model. But if we think of the social model as an equality model and it's not really a model at all, it's a paradigm shift in thinking. So the social model states that, well, disability is socially constructed. Normality is socially constructed. Disability is just another part of the human condition and the human life force. So disability in a very, very, very blunt example I use is this. Disability only happens when an impairment comes in contact with barriers that are created by society. I use a wheelchair sometimes. That's fine. My impairment is makes me, I need to use a wheelchair. I don't want to talk about my impairment. It's very boring. Nobody cares about it. I don't. But my impairment only becomes a disability when something is put in my way, barrier. Very, very simple, very blunt, probably a very crude example. I want to go to the post office. If there's steps into the post office, then my impairment becomes a disability. If there's a ramp into the post office, then I can go straight in. There is one, there's a structural barrier. An attitude of a barrier, which never happens. Use the supermarket and somebody has decided to park their SUV on the ramp outside the supermarket. Well, that there again is another culture of a barrier that needs to be kind of dismantled. So again, these barriers are constructed by society. They're not that I'm using a wheelchair. Again, it's a very blunt example. They're not that I'm using a wheelchair is that these barriers are constructed. These barriers can therefore be deconstructed and deconstructed. If those barriers are put up by society and society can put them down. Think of it this way. And again, another crude example. I'm a terrible person for user analogies. If we think about how we thought about women's rights 100 years ago. If we think about how we taught in society taught about the horrendous way that we thought about people's colours rights, LGBT rights, other to continuously were different from them. But when it comes to disability, it's still the last great barrier. We haven't taken that leap. We haven't started to think about it as an issue of equity, equality and of the human condition. We haven't started to think about disability as a political, social and cultural identity that is created by society with its own history. And that's where the social model comes in. And the social model has been around since the 70s. It's not a new model. It's something very old and something very nice and it's something that has developed over time. And from the social model comes the human rights issues. But I think what's really important is human rights are very important. You have to have rights to make equality real. But the beauty of the social model is it gets us moving. It's a universal model. It changes the idea of the medical model of fixing you to fit you back into society. However, there's another model as well. And that's the charity model. And the charity model is slightly more egregious than the medical model. The medical model is focused solely on fixing you, putting you back into society, your functional limitations. We all need to go to the doctor. We all, you know, let's be honest, like, if I get sick, if I get, I don't need antibiotics. I'm not going to, you know, rob a lemon in the car. I'm going to go deal with it. So that's a grown-up way of thinking of it. And that's just part of the life course. But the charity model is different. The charity model situates disability as a custodial thing. You know, desexualizes the disability, destabilizes it as an identity, puts it into an idea that these people need to be taken care of. And that's quite scary. And it's quite unnerving in the sense that it states that, you know, these people cannot speak for themselves, that they need to be represented. And again, this goes back to the idea of what is a disabled person's organization and the social model of disability and convention of the rights of disabled people. The only one that speaks for LGBT groups are LGBT people, it's LGBT groups. The only one that can speak for women's groups are women. We don't go to men's sheds and say, come here, lads, what do you think about women's? You would never do that. You cannot do that. But with disability, it's different. With disability, it comes the idea that non-disabled groups, groups that provide services for disabled people, charities can somehow represent that. No. That makes for unhealthy society, it makes for unnerving policy, and it makes for a morally shaky compass. We have to look at this in terms, again, of what policy is. The new policy about the CRPD is the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. Well, I am talking about this because it's intrinsically linked to the sustainable development goals. The CRPD Convention on the Rights of Disabled People is a remarkable document. At its core, essentially, it has the social model of disability. It's a beautiful document. I mean, you know, I don't say that lightly about policy, but it is a beautiful document. Each of the articles deal with a different facet, a different point. Ireland rectified it in 2018. It was created in 2005, 2006, 2007, and it was finally ratified by the UN in 2008. At the heart of the UN CRPD, this United Nations Rights Treaty, were disabled people and disabled people's organisations. They draft that influence on that policy. Ireland adopted it in 2018 and now it's been woven into governmental policy. Additionally, if we look at, I'll just check my notes here, the sustainable development goals. The sustainable development goals offer us a framework of a better path forward for the future if there were, you know, an active right. But the sustainable development goals have to have buy-in from people. And what disability rights you have to buy-in from disabled people. So you do that collectively at a grassroots level. And whose better place for that is disabled persons organisation. During the summer, I was very lucky to go to the United Nations with Coalition 2030 and represent Irish civil society. I was privileged to do that. I didn't think of what happened. And, you know, it was a wonderful event. It was a high-level political forum, which was just before the Sustainable Development Goals summit last September. Ireland were presenting their voluntary national review. And it was great to see it. And it was great to be there as part of civil society. But I talk to a lot of people. I like to talk to people. I talk to bus drivers. I talk to taxi drivers. I talk to nurses, doctors, shop assistants. When you talk to people, you ask them questions. You listen. You find out what's going on. And I don't, you know, we don't try to inflect their view. We just listen and see what's happening and collect that perspective. Because perspective equals good policy. If you listen, then you can develop. So on. But in New York, again, it was a privilege to be there, was the fact that I was there with civil society. Ireland is a disabled persons organisation. That was huge. Because it was Irish civil society. It wasn't part of the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. It was part of the Sustainable Development Goals forum. And the Sustainable Development Goals sees humanity as a whole. And that's what disabled people are. They're part of humanity. But we have challenges to our interaction society. Not just nationally, but internationally. And talking to people, whether it's from, you know, I've colleagues in Zambia, I've colleagues in India. The challenges are always the same. Challenges are always misrepresentation, lack of consultation, or policies that directly affect us, which are never shaped by us. Up until recently, and there's a, there's a, there's a recent lovely situation happening where the national disability strategy in Ireland has been reviewed, advised. You know, all credit to the new department for policy. They're really taking a leading role in this. Is that they're making sure that disabled people's voices and agency are shaping that policy that affects us. To this point, policy was not shaped with disability by disabled people. It's a very, I'm not going to say it's a very unique, it's a unique circumstance where policy in Ireland was shaped by industry, about a people. So if we look at department, we use another, another analogy, I apologize. If we look at the instance, an example of transport, imagine if airlines, airline policy and aviation policy was shaped by a low cost, a certain low cost airline, you know, well, that would be quite different. Imagine if, if a business group and business lobby group were shaping enterprise policy and trade policy, it wouldn't happen. There has to be a holistic view to it. If you have policy directly consulted with the people it's going to affect, then you're going to have better policy, better value from money and better society. The last 30 years, policy has been shaped by an industry in Ireland. And the problem is that that's one of the big challenges where there's involvement in the sustainable development goals or involvement in wider society. The sustainable development goals talks about, for instance, you know, sustainable cities, it talks about reducing inequality. You have to take a whole society approach to that. You cannot take just an approach that these people are somehow exempt from this, this whole group of society, because of their functional limitation. You need to be over here and sequestered. So I'll give another example of how we see that being manifested. Public transport is a huge point. If we sort public transport a bit less reliant on cars, it's one of the jigsaw pieces of the environmental piece. We get better public transport, more disabled people. We have to use public transport. There's a very few amount of disabled people that actually use private cars. There's not that many. But that's the narrative you see. The narrative you see is that, you know, we need more cars for disabled people. No, we need better transport, more efficient and more accessible. There is good things happening in public transport. Irish Rail have got their work and hard on it and there has been progress and you have to put credit to that. And there's good things happening across Europe too. If we look at the transport policy for disabled passengers, that works very well too. But there was always a situation where we were seen as outside that are as opposed to climate change, which cannot be that. And that leads into the other narrative about financial cost, power and money and how disabled people's organisations are meeting these barriers. They're not only interacting with the Sustainable Development Goals, but interacting with the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. So there are some of the challenges there. But it's also a positive challenge because what has happened in the last five years, there's been a renewal of the disability rights movement in Ireland. Young disabled people and disabled people in general have seen how socially progressive we can be as a society. And I'll use the simple societies or reflection of that. If we look at the two massive issues which we've had in the last 15 years, the same sex marriage referendum and the women's health referendum, those two. We have to give credit where we're credit is due. Those were the voice of the people. That was Vox Popwells. We were the ones at Votion on that. The government was slightly behind that. I think the media was slightly behind that and they didn't capture the zeitgeist of that era. And yet it was socially progressive. We're the only countries in the world that have democratically voted overwhelmingly for those things. And disability is also like that. Disability is our last great barrier to achieve full equity and equality about putting power back into disabled people's hands as a minority within this country. But that's difficult. And two of the reasons it's difficult as well, policy formation, because if we're using the central statistics office as a metric of disabled people, they're going to say there's nearly a million disabled people in the country. That's the CSO is good for many things, but maybe for this, you need a little bit more nuance perspective. That's a self-declared functional limitation on it. My great-grandinct resolution, let's say I'm disabled, my leg is a bit sore, I'm 97. There you go. That's not it. That's probably not capturing the whole idea of what disability is. And additionally, there's also a power structure. So within disability in Ireland, I refer to this, the charity sector is unique in the European perspective is the power of the charities in Ireland that serves provision. These people do great work. It's fantastic. They provide services, but they do not represent disabled people. They cannot represent disabled people. And when there's a large amount of money been involved in disabled people, again, I will just throw a figure that's been recently revised. 2.7 billion every year goes into disability services in this country of taxpayer money. 2.7 billion. And that provides services to roughly 55,000 people. That money does not go to disabled people. That money goes to organisations to provide services on behalf of disabled people. That's a huge amount of money. It's a vast amount of money. But you have no say in how those services approach. Normally you do, and to do it, you don't. And that needs to be, again, questioned. That needs to be questioned in the power dynamics. That needs to be questioned in terms of, this is a democratic society we live in. And the point of the democratic society that people have a say in how their lives are run. And it's finally coming to a point where this great challenge has been met. But at the same time, there's quite concerning issues, too. We have in the environment, and I keep drawing parallels between the climate justice world and the disability rights world. In climate justice, we have greenwashing. In disability rights movement, we have now able washing. I've coined that term. I don't know how good it is. I don't think it's that great. But able washing is coming in saying, yeah, disability is about rights. It's a social issue. But underpinning that, then, is always an issue. Well, to achieve rights, then we need to give more services to disabled people. Important to recognize that these services are not public services. These services are almost like a shadow economy. Public transport specifically for disabled people. Housing specifically for disabled people. Education systems outside of the third-level mainstream educations. And Vivian knows he's an expert on third-level education in Irish context and disabled students. That's my healthy society. That's a society that's based on segregation. Segregation is unhealthy. It's outdated. And it's bad for all of us. But there is positive happening. There's positive happening in Ireland. There's positive happening in Europe. And there's positive happening in the world. Maybe it's the time we live in. But as I said, the social contracts are under threat. Whether it's housing, education, equality. The cultural wars comes back into it. But again, we are people of points in our society. What do we want Ireland to be? What do we want us to be? How do we want to be seen as a people and treat each other? And I think that disability can be a microcosm for that challenge, for that predicament. And I like to call these things predicaments. And look at them in that sphere. So I think if we look at the Sustainable Development Goals, which are 17 goals, and we look at the Convention of the Rights of Disabled People, both of them can be beautifully interacted. And they work well together. But like anything else, all collective movements. We can have our fantastic figureheads. We can have our amazing leaders in the past. Napoleon's getting a bad rock now from the past. That's the film. But essentially all movements, all changes, happen from the ground up, happen collectively, happen on a grassroots level. And that's how the Sustainable Development Goals will be pushed forward. And I think the Sustainable Development Goals can learn from what DPOs are doing, disabled persons organisation is doing, what we're doing, what we have done in the last five years, ourselves and internationally. And we can learn from them. So that's essentially where we're at with the Sustainable Development Goals. And I throw a lot of acronyms at you. So please feel free to ask me any questions if my Maywees accent has become quite bad. And here's a Wexford accent. James, thank you very much for that really, really informative presentation. You have really covered so much in it and really given people some food for thought. And I've a number of questions myself. I've already received some questions from the audience. So I'm going to be a little bit selfish here first. And I'm going to ask you one of my own questions. You mentioned near the end of your presentation about the importance of the grassroots activism and how many of the best and biggest and most successful campaigns have come from the bottom up. I'm just wondering in an environment where disabled people have been shown to be so underrepresented in the higher levels of management and power. So we know that the Ernest and Young C-suite survey a couple of years ago found that disabled people were underrepresented. And I'm just wondering then, how do we ensure that the ideas and the work that we do on the ground actually gets up to the positions where those decisions are made? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think that's probably because sharing ideals and having a common ideal is it and collectivism. Usually with disability, there's this squeaky wheel syndrome. I think that's what it's called in socio-political circles. I'm not a sociologist, unfortunately. I'm a little bit out of humanity. So with this squeaky wheel, someone will shout loudest, I can't get this fixed. This is ridiculous. I can't get to my local shop. I need that ramp fixed. It'll be all over the local news. That'll get done. I'll get my issues worked out. And it only seems to happen with disabled people and disabled perspectives, the media focus in the nation and policy focus in it. You'll get that little thing done, that wheel will be squeaked and then that will be moved on. But when there's a collective issue, so for instance, I use an example of political participation and one of the things and how that worked. What we did ourselves, within our methodology is that we would have a series of consultation sessions online, sometimes in person, and other avenues too, where people can feed in their views on a certain issue. When narrow those views down, then we create a position paper and then we will use that to mandate on behalf of disabled people for that position paper to be achieved. Political participation is one. I think two, it's that when people are speaking in the same hymn sheet, that disability is about rights and it is about a morally correct pump that's pointing north. And that needs to be kind of pushed forward too. Again though, I think it's very much so is that the trust that you're building up with people when you're building consultations, it's the status quo behavior is, our status quo bias, excuse me, is endemic within disability community. We've had many consultations over the last 20 years and nothing seems to come from it. We've got lovely policy in Ireland, it's beautiful, it's wonderful, it's sitting on the shelf, it's gorgeous, it's got 197 points that have to be achieved or KPI's. But unless policy is short, it's targeted and dare I say it, it's a little bit elegant and concise, then it's going to be hard to achieve. I'll give you a perfect example of this, the green paper consultation. So we recently had a green paper which is a precursor to a white paper, a policy document about revising the disability allowance in Ireland. We're a solution-based organization, we always try to be. It's grand saying, this is wrong, this is terrible, this is bad. But then it's kind of a little bit more difficult to say, okay, well what can we replace it? Let's look at this as an opportunity. How can we develop this? Let's not play on people's fears, let's get people actively involved in shaping this policy. And that's what we're doing with the green paper. We had a series of consultations, we did them straight away, as soon as the green paper came out. We talked to disabled people throughout the country. We developed a position paper on that. And going forward, we're going to have more discussions about how disabled people get into employment. It's all linked, Vivian. Access to education, access to employment, access to housing, access to transport. These are structural barriers that put people at a deficit, not functional limitations. And that's highly important. We have in Ireland, we've got the lowest amount of disabled people in employment in Ireland. That's ridiculous. That's not due to their impairment, although it was framed by some people as that. It's not due to disabled people's impairment. I've heard this numerous times from people around the country. I've talked to 40,000 people around the country when you go to look for... There's great structures accessing education if you're a disabled person. It's fantastic. Education has been great for me. I'm a working-class lab, but it's been fantastic for me. But once that education is over, your resources are gone. They're finished. They move on. So if you need a personal assistant to help you, if you need accessible transport, if you need help with the cost of disability, that's gone. And you're left. And you try to interact with the mainstream employment services. And they're like, we can't do anything. We can't do anything, you know, even though we're mandated too. But they will push you towards disability employment specifics, which is a very low outcome for disabled people, and very much pushing them towards a very custodial place. And that goes into the shadow economy, which is not okay. So I think really it's about mainstream... It's about real inclusion, Vivian. Not just, I'm sorry, not just, you know, tokenistic inclusion or tokenistic cooperation. I think that's an important thing too, is the difference between consultation and cooperative policy formation. Because when it's consultation, we've listened to you, we might have taken it on board, but when it's cooperative, when there's a partnership there and you're developing a policy, that really makes it effective. And it's something I suppose that we're very privileged to be able to do. That trust that we built up with our members and with the collective throughout the country is that we'll do that. We won't do anything but, you know, work with our members. We won't build a position paper without consulting with them. It's slow. Sometimes it can be kind of difficult, but it's the correct way of doing things. That's a really comprehensive answer, James. And what obviously is clear from your response is that it's not straightforward. It's a little bit more complex and nuanced. I have quite a number of questions in now, so I'm going to go to the next one. And if you could pick only one thing that could be done now to progress the situation for people with disability in Ireland, what would that be? And that's from Maeve Carton. And Maeve is an IIE board member. And thank you, Maeve, for submitting that question. One thing. Wow. Can I have five more things? The wishes. That's great, Maeve. That's a really interesting conversation. Do you want to take on that one and go back to you? No, I like that. I think it's got to do with representation. I mean, again, and it's still quite a street experience going to the United Nations in July with the Coalition 2030, with Irish Civil Society, who that spoke a huge thing. That spoke a lot. Disabled people's organizations are now part of the international disability perspective in Ireland. We're not part of that conversation. We're not part of that representation. And that's quite concerning because that's at a national level, feeds into European level, feeds into international level. That's on the termic logic. And it goes against the, it goes against the, on the spirit of the Convention of the Rights of Disabled People. It goes against the spirit of these organizations that are legal entities. And it goes against the spirit of, you know, of what we're trying to do here. So what I would do is, I would look at that and have a more, I suppose, I suppose, and I'm trying to be as quite as careful as I can and nice as I can. I would kind of, if I could do one thing, I would get rid of the gaslighting. That's what I would do. I would get rid of the fact that the messages are being difficult to understand about the ideologies are being difficult to understand and the underlying sentiments are being difficult to understand. James, can I just ask, when you say it's sorry now, and I don't mean to interrupt your flow there, but in terms of understanding ideologies, understanding the messages, what do you mean here? What I mean is that there's one thing, when you invest in an industry, you're invested in an industry. When you invest in people, you invest in people and we need to invest in disabled people. We don't need to invest in disabled people. It's not about more money. It's about a better allocation of resources. It's about a fairness of resources. We're at this point because policy was shaped by industry up until this point. And it's difficult for disabled people to come and say, look, this is not okay, because a lot of the time, too, there's huge power held over disabled people's lives. We have to use services. That's what we have to do. But we have no input into how those services are run. We have no way of where that service is allocated. There is a very small amount of people that can run those services themselves and direct payments, but it's extremely difficult to labor is to do so. That's not the same other European countries. If we look at, for instance, in some of the Nordic countries, there's a direct payment for disabled people. You or I get a direct payment if we need services. We can go live our daily lives, go to work, get a job, have a family, walk the dog, fight, go to jail. I don't care. But we have that money from the government. That money can only be spent by the disabled person. Sorry, for the disabled person, it can be allocated to some other issue or another service. And it's us to decide where that goes. The same in Germany, same in Australia. So it's not a unique circumstance. We're not, we're very much an outsider in the rest of Northern Europe with view disability and how disability is treated. In one hand, we're talking about rights and models, culture and advancements of society. And in other hand, we're still feeding a machine that owns the values of our impairments that still says, look it, we'll take care of these people. We'll take care of this problem. This is a historical thing. This goes back to the foundation of the state. The state was poor. We didn't have much money. The church comes in. Again, I'm going to use simplistic historical view. And a lot of the large service providers and again, they do great work, but they're not representative organizations. And when they shape policy, the policy would always be about keeping themselves going. And that's very important. You have to. That's what it is. But I think the gas line should be to say, well, that's fine as long as you say that. But you cannot say we represent disabled people. And therefore if you give us this, disabled people have a better life because that's not really in the spirit. It's very clear what a disabled person's organization and how their work is by the CRPD and our own national disability authority have done that. And the government are recognizing it. So I think that would be the one thing is to recognize the primacy of the disabled people's organization, but also to eliminate that gaslighting and mixed messaging. Yeah. Thank you very much, James. And I was just thinking there during the presentation that I know that the independent living movement in Ireland is linked to the independent living movement in Europe. Isn't that correct? Yeah. No, we're not. Explain it to me. Yeah. So we're not actually... How it works within... I'll start at the top. So regionally, it's interesting. It's the state-level development goals and state-level development goals for them. Disability seems to be omissioned from that. It doesn't seem to interact with that as much. That's the United Nations protocol, the United Nations Treaty or framework. And it's a really good one if it wasn't active. But the disability sector in that when the major groups just put in a paper in that, there wasn't really a presence there this year, are not that I've seen or one that was highly effective. Again, I spoke on behalf of civil society on behalf of disability major groups. So how it works is that each country in the world feeds into either a regional space. So for instance, you'd have the European federations, you have the Latin American ones. There is specific impairment ones like Down Syndrome International, like the World Death Union, which will have a space too, an entity that's called the International Disability Alliance. And the International Disability Alliance is a legal entity which has huge influence over the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People and the Commission on the protocols. So that's based in Geneva and what that does is that looks at other countries and how the shadow reports are going and how they're implementing the CRPD. Essentially, they're the go-to people. In Ireland, DPO's are not represented outside of Europe in the European Disability Forum. So the European Disability Forum is the representative organisation from Europe, but DPO's aren't at that. Okay, okay. We won't go into it now, but it seems a little complicated, I suppose, for some people it can seem a little complicated. But I think the main thing is that you're doing great work in Ireland. I have a load of questions to get through, James, so I'm going to have to ask you for maybe a little tighter response on some of them so as that we can get through them. It's not necessarily that I want you to give us less, but I want to make sure we get our questions in. So we have, and I'll just ask anybody who's submitting a question, please make sure that you note the organisation that you maybe aligned to when you are putting that in. The questioning. So I have a question in here from Jane Madden, and Jane asks the question, how can we ensure that disabled people's views are taken into account? There seems to be consultation, but views are not represented in implementation. This is in view of the new disability strategy being developed in Ireland right now, and Jane goes on to note that it was highlighted in the most recent Irish report to the UNCRPD Committee. So if you could maybe give a brief response on that. Yeah, that's a brilliant question, Jane, and thanks for that, Vivian. A very brief response is, well, I suppose when there's consultation, consultation is great, but to be fair now to the National Disability Authority and the new department, they recognise that it has to be collective bargaining and collective responses. So when you have a union, that's what DPOs are, they're unions essentially, and they have a certain structure, they have a specific structure, and that's clearly outlined by the CRPD and by the National Disability Authority. So it's much easier to develop policy and consultation when you have a couple of points of contact rather than three million different views or four million different views. So I think that's how you do it. You consult directly with disabled persons organisations and co-create with disabled people's organisations. The NDS, the National Disability Strategy, has been redeveloped now, and I think this is an opportune moment for that to happen. Thank you, James, and I think there are a number of developments going on in Ireland at the minute in terms of that green paper in relation to employment and allowances and National Disability Inclusion Strategy and to come something on the company heads of employment strategy, which is coming to an end now as well, of course. So there's a lot of policy work going on at the minute. I just wondered, James, very quickly, do you not think that this is a huge amount of work on disabled volunteers and would you be concerned that disabled people may suffer from activist exhaustion? Oh, yeah, 100%. You know more than I do. We're always on display. There's always an assumption that well, this ties into the power dynamics too. This ties into the power dynamics of, you know, come here, you on the street. We walk to someone on the street and go, come here, you French. They go, yeah, come here. Tell us about French policy. Tell us about French foreign policy. You don't grab just one random person, but when it comes to disability, come here, you disabled person. Tell us what you think about how policy formation should be done. This is where the social model comes in. This is where the collective model comes in. The medical model and the charging model puts emphasis on the individual that the problems are yours to be solved, but also we can solve it for you. But the social model and the human rights model, it unnerves that. And that's where that comes in. So again, it goes back to the idea of collective agreement, collective processes, where those are structured around them. I mean, even with the way we do, we run consultations in the evening through via virtual formats. And we're going to those objectively. So it does put a lot of pressure on us too. So again, that's about inclusion as well. I mean, if you're expecting people to take part in this, and we've been advocating for this a while, and we have a lovely activity. If you want to have a look on our website, we have a beautiful position paper called Make an Inclusion Reality, where we actually embed our values into an inclusive consultation space with South Dublin County Council, where people who were taken part as representatives of the disability rights movement were actually getting financed and paid for their time there. A lot of these consultation spaces, if it's local authority councillors, whoever's there, they're getting paid. But we might not be. And that's kind of the point where it kind of goes, hold on here. You want us to give our lived experience that we're not going to pay people to actually get there or be part of that conversation. So I do think it is, but we do have that format in place. And it's something we're conscious of. Thank you, James. And I think that's a really important point. It's the point around recognising and not only the... and recognising and valuing not only the lived experience of disabled people, but also the professional experience that they're bringing to the table. And many disabled people have a large amount of professional experience when they attend those consultations. So we can't speak about the SDGs without speaking more about climate and climate change. And many disabled people would often feel that they are left out of the discussions in relation to it. Our decisions are actually being made quickly without their input. And of course, I have a question in here from Lorraine Lalli. Hi, Lorraine. Lorraine is a board member with me on the National Disability Authority. And Lorraine has a great question. I love your positive approach, James. Both with climate change, I do fear for those in rural areas. I find there is an urban-rural divide and I imagine that's here in Ireland that is often forgotten by the disability organisations. The conversation on this has not happened yet. We'd love to hear from people from outside Dublin. And maybe you could give a quick response because we're coming up close now to the end, James. Thank you. No, I think that's great, Lorraine. I'll be honest with you. I'm not from Dublin. I don't live in Dublin. And most of the disabled people don't live in Dublin. But she's 100% right. We have to think of it. And this buys into the idea of climate change and healthier societies, better societies. So outside of Dublin, I was just thinking this yesterday when I got off the train, I was going right, I've been waiting an hour and a half for the bus in Galway to go one kilometre. So I just walked and I pushed myself in the rain. But then in Dublin, I hopped in the Lewis and I was from A to B and that's better for everybody. It's healthier, it's more efficient, it's socially conscious, but it's also environmentally conscious. But we have to be part of that conversation. So again, there is issues like there is local link, which is a series of network of buses throughout the country which are meant to be accessible and I mean, but be honest with you, trying to figure out their timetable, you need a degree in physics and cryptology because it's very difficult. But I think the conversations around rural climate change is hugely important. We've seen it last week and there was a tornado meter. I mean, it's on our doorstep. The storms, etc. We have a holistic approach to disability, not just. And I don't... I mean, again, the consultations and how we do consultations are always throughout the country. I wouldn't say... I'd say we definitely recognise that it is nationwide and that most people will live in the country. And then that buys into consultations too, how consultations are done. The virtual format works for everybody. What can we do about those? Well, I think most of the big issue for people living in rural areas and are disabled, it's a social justice as well as a climate issue. Public transport is a huge one. If you don't have public transport, you can't get to the job. We talked about the professional aspects. Disabled people want to work, but it's getting to that work is the important thing. If they can't get to work, then they can't work. Also where we live, access to housing is a huge issue, not just in Dublin, but outside of the main cities. If we... And I talked to a colleague in the AHB yesterday, once we have a stable place, a base to live, a house, we can make plans, we can move forward, we can go on. But if we position disabled people at a point of poverty at the very start, then that's measuring the achievements right there. So I think, yes, climate change will happen in rural areas, but I also think that ties in with everything else. It's all linked. It's like a dragon eating its tail. That's probably a bad analogy, but it is all linked. Yeah, and absolutely right now, I think Milarene makes a good point that, of course, I'm from a rural area, so I'm rural Ireland, so I'm a little bit biased, but I'm sure people all over Europe who live in rural areas have similar experiences, and it is important that we are fully considered. I think this is going to be the last question, because our time unfortunately, James, is just about up and it comes from Michael Sefu. Michael, hello Michael. Michael is a board member with me on the Disability Advisory Committee on the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. Hi Michael, good to see you and thank you for your question. Thanks for quite an informative presentation, James. Any comment as to how we could make DPOs, that means disabled people organizations, themselves inclusive of the wide spectrum of identities among the disabled community. It will be very important to recognize that disabled people are varied, not just in terms of type of disability, but also other factors including gender, migrant background, etc. And can I just know if we actually had one or two other questions relating to the intersectional nature of disability. So Michael's question actually will capture most of those points. That's a great question. That's at the heart of what we've done since we started my years ago, is to recognize the intersectionality of disability. Disability is now homogenous. There's often a cultural hierarchy of disability where we have a person, a very pretty white person in a wheelchair. This is just at the very top and everyone else comes from that. Disability effects, impairment effects, everybody. I mean most of the people who are affected by climate change are women in the rural south. And that's a huge issue. We build allyship, and to answer Michael's point, we build allyship. And ourselves in ILMI have built allyship within wider civil society and wider groups. I'm a board member of the Irish Network Against Racism. We were part of the Women's Council, some of my colleagues. We have different groups and we reach out to people and we're open to people. We recognize that diversity that has to be part of them. Disability is part of the human condition as well as everything else. And to respect that. And to say that different people's perspectives have different needs and different things to take into account. When we started we were very conscious about that. We always knew that. Disability doesn't affect white Catholic people living in Westport, that's me. I'm not Catholic, but that's the point is that to look at it from that lens and to look at wider society, get us out of this disability narrow perspective and say, there's other identities. There's a period of disability studies that disability is the one point of intersectionality that could link us all. And that's the old academic thing where Leonard Davis talks about that. He talks about how disability as an identity, as a cultural, historical, social figurative place can be something that links every other identity. Whether that's people of color or people of different nationalities, religions, LGBT plus community, different, you know, different parts of the world. It's key. And I did find that. I talked to colleagues international, disabled people, organizations international. We're all having the barriers are different. But the impetus behind them is the same. The impetus behind them is the same. It's lack of consultation and it's tablewashing. We're finding that at the same time. But we're also working collectively to meet those. James, thank you very much for a really, really informative presentation today. I'm for answering all of our questions so comprehensively. And there really was, I haven't gotten through half the number of questions that I received today in relation to your presentation. And I'm sorry to the audience members that I didn't get to. That brings to a close our the IIEA's inaugural seminar series on disability. And we, over that three, over the three lectures, we heard from Professor Gerd Quinn, UN Special Rapporteur on Disabilities. We heard from the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities in Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and particularly Saif Vihen who shared her experiences of education in and higher education as a person with an intellectual disability. And of course we've heard from James today who brought it to the close as part of our celebrations of International Day for Persons with Disabilities. And really what James has highlighted today I think is the important role that disabled people's organisations play and should play in the implementing and embedding of the SDGs. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the IIEA for running this seminar series and who are now planning on looking at doing further ones in the new year due to the success of this series. I'd like to wish you all a very happy Christmas in whatever way you choose to spend it and I hopefully look forward to seeing you all in 2024. Thank you to everybody.