When I look back on the year in Irish politics, I think of a skeleton in Florida. On its east coast, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the Kennedy Space Center, is the Windover Archeological Site, a muck pond where the skeletal remains of 168 people were found buried in peat at the bottom. The skeletons are all thousands of years old, and some date from thousands apart: generations upon generations of people used it as a burial site.
Among the skeletons was a 15-year-old boy with a host of developmental issues, including spina bifida. Given the extent and severity of his disabilities, he likely couldn’t walk, let alone directly contribute to his people’s survival in a hunter-gatherer society. He probably had to be carried everywhere he went his whole life. Yet even in an environment as hostile to human life as prehistoric Florida, his people did not view him as a burden or a strain on resources. They didn’t leave him to die of exposure so they’d have one less non-productive mouth to feed. He was just another member of the tribe, so they cared for him. They carried him.
It’s 2024 and here in Ireland, the environment is not hostile to human life, quite the opposite. People bend the environment to their will. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and most of us enjoy a level of comfort and convenience no one buried in Windover could even begin to imagine. Yet parents of children with spina bifida have spent this entire year – and so many years before this – begging our government to provide the medical treatment to which they are entitled.
I could tell a lot of different stories about why that’s the case. A ruling class with an electoral monopoly. The legacy of Catholic anticommunism on healthcare. Ireland as the neoliberal dream curdled into nightmare. But all these stories, while part of the picture, turn on one fundamental fact.
Disabled people are not respected in this country, and our lives are not valued. We are not, perhaps, subject to as much open hatred and contempt as we might be elsewhere, or in times past. But we are generally not seen as human beings with the right to fully participate in all aspects of society, and if we are, it’s usually because people think our disabilities don’t count or aren’t real. It is not respect that underpins how disabled people are treated in this country, but pity, so you must be pitiful to count as disabled. We are poor things, to be tutted over and talked past, or tokenised as inspirational.
It’s better than a kick in the teeth, but pity kills too. Pity says a disabled life isn’t worth living, so why make it a good one? Pity says disabled people can’t speak for themselves, so why bother trying to listen? Pity is the tear rolling down your cheek as you press the pillow over our sleeping faces.
We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet a significant number of disabled people here receive a primary school education or less. We are one of the wealthiest countries in all human history, yet disabled people are routinely locked away in residential institutions rife with abuse rather than supported in living in our communities. We are one of the wealthiest countries there is ever likely to be, yet parents of children with spina bifida are begging the government for medical treatment.
Today, the 33rd Dáil is dissolved, and the voters of this republic have once again been asked what kind of country we want to be. I don’t know what to expect, nor what to hope for. I just know we deserve better than this.
Left in the Lurch 