An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-17
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Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin

I raise the issue of disability again in this House. What is happening on the watch of this Government? It campaigned on a note of disability in the general election after the previous Government lost the care referendum. The wording of that referendum was designed to indemnify the State from any responsibility towards disabled citizens and their inalienable fundamental human rights. It was defeated by 75% of those who voted. Here we are, having campaigned on a disability platform, we find that 500 spinal surgeries have been cancelled in the past two years. That is two every week. Every single one of those cancellations is a family like mine, with a 17-year-old son struggling for breath because his spinal curve is so pronounced that his lungs are compressed. His heart is pushed into a part of the chest cavity where the heart is not normally found. He had to go undergo surgery as an anaesthetic risk to be manually extubated after almost eight hours of surgery by an anaesthetist because if he had gone to intensive care intubated, he would not have made it. All of this is predictable and avoidable.
Children's Health Ireland, CHI, presented last week at a conference of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association, IHCA, congratulating itself on its move to the children's hospital, which is probably the most expensive hospital in the world and in the history of humanity. Yet, nobody has been held to account, either for the spinal or urology waiting lists where teenage boys and girls are being denied routine urological surgery interventions, meaning that they become infertile, their little reproductive organs cannot develop properly or they become incontinent as teenagers. The risk that they are exposed to renal cancer, colon cancer, testicular cancer is increased many times because of the lack of these interventions. What is going on?
When it comes to intellectual disability, we discover there is now a pause, one designed to destroy the few supports available for neurodivergent and neurodiverse children in our schools.
What is going on? I will tell the House what is going on. I have a letter here from a head of service in the HSE to a mother who had to bring her adult child with Down's syndrome to an emergency department because she could not cope any more as she is too old. The letter she got from the HSE states she should be aware "there is a legal obligation for parents to support their child financially if the child is dependent", and that this applies to all children to the age of 18, and to 23 if in education, but "indefinitely if the child has a disability". The previous Government failed to get that wording into the Constitution on the advice of the Attorney General. Now, this Government is trying to introduce this abandonment of families with disabled citizens. The letter continued: "Accordingly, you are legally obliged to support your daughter. That includes the provision of accommodation until you die." That is not good enough. What is going on? Senators must talk to their Ministers at their parliamentary party meetings.
What is the Government doing? It is turning back the clock. The objective circumstances of living for disabled citizens are deteriorating. In advance of our Presidency of the European Union, I will be talking to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights about this absolute disgrace and the manner in which the Government is abandoning families. It is flying in the face of the people who, in the largest ever vote in a referendum - 75% - rejected the previous Government's Dickensian wording. Yet, the Government persists.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-17