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Transcript: Interview with President McAleese
On Thursday, June 19th 2008, Uachtaráin na hÉireann, Mary McAleese, hosted her Annual Forum at Áras an Uachtaráin. This year the focus was on Accessibility and Attitudes to Disabled People in Ireland. The President invited contributors from all over Ireland, people with disability as well as talking to representatives of key organisations working in the area of disability at local and national level. She also invited Mooney to be there. Derek met with her ahead of the forum, and began by asking her the background to these forums...
Derek Mooney meets President McAleese in the Council of State room at Áras an Uachtaráin
President Mary McAleese: Well the idea is simply to take part in many of the National Debates that are going on, on all sorts of subjects so that Áras an Uachtaráin plays its part in the kind of debates that are going on in the community. Whether it's about suicide - as we had our forum on suicide, as you known we've had a forum on our elderly. And particularly the elderly who don't really engage enough socially. People who would be dealing with fairly serious loneliness. And this latest is on the subject of disability. Because there's been an ongoing national debate about disability for several generations now and out of that debate has come a much greater sensitivity to issues around disability. I think it probably started off for most people around issues to do with mobility really. But it has broadened of course; people have moved way way beyond seeing the issue of disability of solely about being mobility. But we've begun to understand access differently, we've begun to understand building differently, building houses, new regulations. A kind of a new mandate if you like, that every place should be at least physically accessible to people. But it has moved beyond that. We begin to see that disability is a much broader thing. Our Special Olympics brought home to us the whole focus on ability, and really challenged us to particularly challenge public attitudes which were over immersed if you like in what people can't do and had not enough focus on what people could do, and what they were capable of doing, and how attitudes and wrong attitudes can disempower people. Mental health is another obvious area where attitudinal problems are pretty much a big obstacle course. So we are taking part really here today in a debate about attitudes in disability and the extent to which civic society, that's you and me and ordinary everyday people can do a little bit more to help break down those unnatural and unnecessary obstacles to people's progress.
Derek Mooney: Do you think that we relate very well to people with a disability? When we think of disability we think of the symbol of a person in a wheelchair which designates a parking spot or the internationally recognised symbol for disability. And the first thing I noticed when I arrived at the visitors' car park here are two disabled car parking spaces and I can see they're very clear. And then when I arrive at the Áras itself I can you've plenty of access for people who have a physical disability. Do we relate differently to people with a physical disability than we do to people who have maybe perhaps a mental disability?
President Mary McAleese: I think that there is little doubt that people who live with mental illness do experience very very deep routed and difficult public attitudes. I think there has been a recent survey you know which has show that and I think most of us would understand that. That that's a particularly difficult one. It's not unshiftable because we have seen that, just take the issue of going back to the issue of physical disability and access issues. We've seen huge changes over the last number of years, even in this house itself. This house is two hundred and fifty years old and when it was built I don't think anybody thought at all of access issues, it just wasn't on their agenda. And it was probably the best part of two hundred and odd years before it came on anybody's agenda. And when it first came on the agenda, I mean when I first came to the house, there was a rather, a sort of elderly system for getting one wheelchair in at a time. So that meant that it would have been very very difficult to have had an event here, like the event that we are having today, where we have quite a number of people who will need easy wheelchair access. Now the house over the last eighteen months has undergone a major access program, and it is how a heck of a lot better than it ever was. That's not to say it's right yet, because we will be getting feedback, the house is used every day of the week, there are people coming in day and daily. And we encourage them to give us feedback, because we know perfectly well that even the huge amount that has been done in the last eighteen months is still not enough for a house of this size and a house of this scale. So there's still a lot of work to be done and I would say that's the same everywhere. But on the other hand it is important to say that over that last thirty years all of us and all, you know builders, designers, engineers, architects, planners, we've all become very very conscious of access issues in a way that we never were growing up. Now I think that we've seen big changes, things that could and should have been done, now being done. I think the issue of mental, mental ill health is something that we really have treated to some extent as kind of the last taboo subject in many ways. And that's where we really want to engender, if we can, a really good debate. Because we've seen the stats, I mean the stats are there in terms of youth suicide, we see them in terms of elder suicide, we see them, you know in terms of people who are feeling very very excluded from life, who live life on the margins and here is an area that attitudes do still play a big role in making people feel marginalised.
Derek Mooney: Well I was interested to read that the National Disability Authority carried out a survey in 2001 and then again most recently found that there's hardly any change to our attitudes towards people who have got a disability. And half of those surveyed said that children with a mental disability should not be in school with other children. That's a bit sad isn't it really?
President Mary McAleese: Well doesn't it show you how important a forum like this is. And how important is it's that we keep this ongoing national debate. This is about educating ourselves, it's about reducing fears, because a lot of that I think comes from fear. Now I'm talking at a conference tomorrow, the British Psychology Association and the Irish Association of Psychologists, they're all meeting. They're having a joint conference tomorrow and one of the little stanzas I'm using is from Dean Jonathan Swift who you know was the great beneficiary, the great benefactor of St. Patrick's Hospital, because he knew that the service of the Mental Health Services of his day, which is in the seventeen hundreds, 1740's, were atrocious. And he wanted them improved and yet in his little stanza he describes people as mad. Now that word itself, that word itself is very, very loaded, very pejorative today. It would be regarded as politically very incorrect today; in fact I'm making that point tomorrow. But unfortunately to see all those loaded ideas, they have a shelf life that is really very long. They last a long time in the public thinking. And that kind of stereotype, that kind of prejudice, that kind of fear, the kind of attitude is, it can be hard to shift. It was generations in the making, it could very well be generations in the unmaking. We've just got to do our work in our day to unmake it as well as we can.
Derek Mooney: Can I be totally honest with you, it's very hard to know what to say, or how to describe somebody. Using the right language is always a difficulty, to find the right language.
President Mary McAleese: And the language is changing so much. I mean nowadays the kind of language that we would have used, I mean for example nowadays you don't hear people talking about 'the disabled' because that's regarded nowadays as loaded. And now it is 'people with disabilities' or 'disabled people'. You don't talk about 'the disabled' because even that language can have a sense of some kind of barrier around it, some kind of exclusivity, and we're about the business of inclusion, we're about the business, really we're about the business in Ireland you know of honouring that gorgeous phrase, going right back to the Proclamation of 1916, and it is a phrase that really everybody loves and uses regularly, 'cherishing the children of the nation equally' loads of people think it's in the Constitution, I sometimes wish that it was because so many people think that it is in the Constitution but it's not.
Derek Mooney: Maybe we should have a referendum on that?
President Mary McAleese: Don't even go there, ha, ha, ha!
Derek Mooney: Ha, ha, I forgot I wasn't allowed to say that, ha, ha, ha!
President Mary McAleese: Not with me, not with me, let that be somebody else. But a lot of people, I think it's very interesting that people have kind of internalised that that phrase means a lot to them, and they want to live in a country where the children of the nation are cherished equally, but somehow sometimes we just don't know how to go about it. Take for example the man who is going to be chairing today's session. He is a man called Professor Michael Schwartz. He is a native born New Yorker and he was born profoundly deaf like my own brother John. And his parents, like my parents, were told well he's profoundly deaf so the first thing you do is, you know you'll send him eventually to a special school, but don't expect too much, because the deaf don't have the intellectual capacity of other people. Utter... that was by experts; that was by professionals, they were utterly ignorant and yet they were the professionals. Now Michael's parents, took, you know they listened to that and they said actually you know what, we really don't believe the professionals. And so they charted a very different course for their son from the course that was set by the expertise of the day. And now this man is one of the, probably the most famous Professors of Disability Law in the United States, the first ever profoundly deaf person from birth, profoundly deaf person to hold such a position and it's an extraordinary story. With Michael's help, when I met him a number of years ago I was just at that time trying to generate a debate in Northern Ireland about deaf education, because it's an area I've had a longstanding interest in because of my own family circumstances, and family interest and it bothered me that no single child, born profoundly deaf, had ever gone to third level education, on this island. Imagine that.
Derek Mooney: Goodness.
President Mary McAleese: So we started the debate and Michael came and chaired, again many years go he chaired the big conference, first major conference of its type on deaf education, and of course that story has now changed quite dramatically in terms of third level access to deaf, access for the deaf to third level education. I'm talking here about the profoundly deaf, but also others who are deaf, but in particular that catchment group of profoundly deaf from birth. They found so many obstacles, so many obstacles to their communication. There was a time when the experts, not that long ago, believed that those children should not be taught sign language. My own brother and his contemporaries would have been smacked in school for using sign language.
Derek Mooney: Why?
President Mary McAleese: Because at that time they were being taught through an exclusively oral method and people and people wanted to discourage them from using sign language, which we now know was really an awful thing because these were children who had major communication problems, we should have been using every means of communication to open them up, and of course, they all used sign language behind backs because it was their means of communication. The result was that many of them ended up both illiterate in English and also semi-literate in sign language. That's the past, that's way in the past thank goodness. Everyone has grown up from those days but it is interesting just to realise that in our lifetime how much has changed, how much has been turned on its head and we'd like to think that the only way those things you know is by dialogue, by discussion, and in particular by listening to the voices of those who are people with disabilities. What is their ambition for themselves? What experience in their lives will help us to understand how to create a better future for them and for others who are coming along in the future who will also live with similar disabilities? How can we in our own civic society and our own lives as individuals and collectively as a community, how can we change our attitudes to open up space for them to be children who are cherished equally?
Derek Mooney: I've so many questions running through my mind but the one thing about sign language is, it is just that, a language, a means of communication.
President Mary McAleese: A wonderful language.
Derek Mooney: And it's a beautiful thing to see.
President Mary McAleese: A beautiful language.
Derek Mooney: One of the most interesting things I ever saw was at the Royal Albert Hall when Elton John was having a benefit concert for AIDS and they had a person signing all of the songs and all of the comedy.
President Mary McAleese: Yes.
Derek Mooney: Everybody was.... I mean the person who was doing the signing was just fascinating to watch.
President Mary McAleese: And it's wonderful, and it's picked up so easily by children, so very easily by children who spontaneously really understand sign language.
Derek Mooney: I suppose it gets back to the children as well, you said you had a personal interest in this because your brother was born profoundly deaf, so you knew nothing different so you didn't think there was anything odd about it other than the fact that he was your brother and he didn't communicate the same way as you did?
President Mary McAleese: No, but we were able to see, if we were very rigorously honest, we would see how, for a deaf person living with people who are not deaf, and in particular living in a big family with people who are not deaf how difficult it still was. I mean my memory of my brother is he had eight brothers and sisters and a load of cousins who all lived on top of one another and you have thought, wouldn't you, that with all of those people around he would never be lonely, he would never be left out, but still my abiding memory is of course that we would chitter and chatter away and every so often he would tug my elbow and say, remember me, I'm here, what's going on? So we would have to... you do have to make special space and that's about being sensitive, it's about being caring, it's about having the tools, the coping skills whether it's the sign language or whether it is an attitude that helps you to include. And I'm very conscious that even with the best will in the world and even loving my brother to bits, as we did and do, that somehow the world, the speed of the hearing world blinded us at times, pushed us forward at times without remembering always to include him in the ways that he needed to be included, and I think that would be the experience of man, many deaf people. It's the experience of many people with disability that people, with the best will in the world sometimes forget that they have it in their power to be much more inclusive than they are being. It's not that people deliberately decide to be exclusive, it's not that they decide to be rude, it's just that they don't think and so debates and dialogues like we're having today at the Aras are about making us stop and think, broaden our thinking, broaden our coping skills and make us much more sensitive around our own behaviour and our own attitudes in relation to people with disability.
Derek Mooney: But it's a mindset change, that's what's needed because you mentioned the experts earlier said that profoundly deaf people shouldn't learn sign language and they're not going to amount to very much and they never went to third level education and sure just let them off and don't expect too much from them. That was taught ignorance....
President Mary McAleese: Wasn't it laughable...
Derek Mooney: So what you're doing today is hopefully going to change that but doesn't it need to be an even bigger drive than that and perhaps something that's on the national curriculum?
President Mary McAleese: Well you see now you're into government policy and now you're into things that really I'm not a part of.
Derek Mooney: What would you like to see in there?
President Mary McAleese: Well I'm not going to get involved in a debate about what government policy should be. What I will say is that we have seen massive changes a both those levels, both the policy level and at social attitudinal level and those have really been generated, in many ways over a debate that has taken place over the last three decades. That debate really got galvanised over the last three decades. Going way back I remember to the first European Special Day focussing on disability. We'd never thought of days like that before. We'd never had that kind of focus and really step by step both at policy level, at governmental policy level and at the level of lobbying by parents and self-interest groups and self-help groups and advocacy groups and at the level of public or civic discourse, the kind of dialogue that we are having today, we've seen really very considerable changes. That's not to say that we have arrived at any kind of complacency platform or any place that we should say is enough because it's far from the story, but we are, I think, well on the road. There's a real momentum now, and I mean we've seen wonderful things happening in terms of disability strategy and we've seen now, thankfully over the last number of years, so many of these groups, advocacy and lobbying groups, really part of a national discourse; not having to fight for their space in terms of being listened to by government or being listened to by civic society. There space is there. Even last night sitting down with my brother, I remember the times whenever he used to be lobbying intensively for special provisions for sub-titles on television and I remember those battles and they seem such a very short time ago and yet now he just sits down and lifts the little, what we call around here the 'doofer', but a remote control and one button and sub-titles. And yet still we went through the channels last night together, just to see how many of them have that facility and quite a few of them still do not. One particular channel when we came to it he just threw his eyes up to heaven but these are jobs still to be done. These are jobs still to be done and thank goodness there are extraordinary lobby groups out there and they have been highly successful.
Derek Mooney: And the interesting thing with modern technology, that is a simple job.
President Mary McAleese: It is.
Derek Mooney: Again, that's just a mindset. If they have the script for a programme they can put up the text there.
President Mary McAleese: It's about thinking, it's about inclusion, it's about planning. It's about planning for who is your audience, who do you want to be your audience.
Derek Mooney: Everybody.
President Mary McAleese: Everybody. Who's entitled to be your audience?
Derek Mooney: Everybody.
President Mary McAleese: Everybody and not everybody is the same. Everybody has different... people have very, very different needs but from a time when there was no subtitling to a time now when we could comfortably sit together and watch a TV programme it's a move, you know it's a big change and we'll see today at this conference the best of technologies, the very best of new technologies; the CART system for example that allows simultaneous subtitling of the text of speakers as they are speaking, along with sign language. All of that will be there today. Loops, all of those things for hearing and for people who are deaf and all of that kind of thing that has really made life so much easier for those with disability. I have been around very, very many organisations that are advocates for those with different, very, very many different types of disability and they are formidable. You look at... one of the recent ones that I was at was the opening of the new National Council for the Blind headquarters in Cork and there they have a range now of all sorts of aids people can have in their homes. that they can have in their workplace, that make their lives safer and easier and these are gadgets and gizmos, it could be a special thing for ensuring that if a person is taking a cup of tea that they don't overfill the cup and pour boiling water over themselves; something as simple as that. Or when they are opening tins that the gadget is for people, for example, who have maybe suffered from arthritis or have problems with their hands, specially adjustable, adaptive gadgets and so more, and more and more we're seeing designers, we're seeing engineers, we're seeing the planners do exactly what you say; ask the question who's going to use this and realising that the audience that uses it is a very diverse audience with very diverse needs and so you meet the needs and in particular you try your best to meet the needs of those who are going to have the most difficulty.
Derek Mooney: President McAleese, thank you very much indeed.
President Mary McAleese: Not at all, you're very welcome.
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