Scandinavia

In 1994 I visited Sweden. I was offered the chance to go to Sweden by one of my father’s former business colleagues and took the challenge eagerly.

My primary reason for going to Sweden was to fold firstly to find out what computer equipments was available as I had just completed my first year in collage when the trip was proposed.

After I had come to Sweden I found that the rehabilitation centres are housed under the department of Labour rather than health. The people of Sweden had past a referendum ensuring that anybody with a disability who needed a personal assistant for more than twenty hours a week could get personal assistant help to insure that they could live and work independently.

For people who are confused about the term personal assistant it is not just used in business terms but also as part of one of the main planks of the social model of independent living for people with severe physical and sensory disabilities.

In Sweden and other Scandinavian countries the rehabilitation centres find jobs for the clients based on their abilities rather than their disabilities.

Two cases coming to my mind as illustration of this. One was a man who only had to use a one finger and was on oxygen twenty-four hours a day. The oxygen was only removed when he was eating. Yet he came to work from eight am to five pm and did a database for the local or national museum. The other case was a woman who had a stroke and was also working on the same database for the same hours every day. Both of them had adapted apartments and personal assistants to help them do what they could not do.

The government should look at how Scandinavian countries have dealt with difficult economic times. I was fortunate to meet a former Danish prime minister last February at a Labour Party economic summit in the Westbury Hotel and I have no shame in admitting that I am a Labour party supporter.

I had made a comment about how one of my personal assistants was only paid seventy-five Irish pounds when she began working for me under the umbrella of Irish Wheelchair Association and how those with personal assistant had to campaign for higher wages in order to make the job attractive. I cannot remember the man’s name but I remember what he said very clearly.

He told that his government came to power after a similar economic situation to the one Ireland is faced at the moment. I was told that there was an automatic belief that those receiving any kind of state assistance should work in order to keep the assistance they were getting. By the time he stepped down the unemployment rate had gone from ten percent to three percent and again there was the same creative thinking as in Sweden.

Why does not the Irish government take the example of Scandinavian countries and focus on people’s abilities rather then their disabilities?