New disabled persons’ organisation starts up in Dublin

The Dublin Disabled Person’s Organisation (DPO) launched last Wednesday at the Mansion House, part of a push to create a network of such organisations, with one for each county.

It was set up with support from Independent Living Movement Ireland (ILMI), said Peter Kearns, the ILMI’s DPO development officer.

Kearns said he hopes it will bring together disabled voices from across coalitions – groups for the blind, the mobility impaired, the autistic, people with hidden disabilities, and more – and bring that representation to the council.

In 2018, Ireland ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). 

That convention gives people with disabilities special rights to consultation on decisions and policies that affect them. And, that consultation has to be with organisations led by people with disabilities.

Kearns said he wants to see the Dublin DPO take up that mandate – as a collective organised and run by disabled people, using the language of disabled people, talking directly with disabled people.

One point of contention at Dublin City Council has been whether officials have been approaching consultation with DPOs in the right way – and, also for some projects, whether they had been going about it at all. 

Ciarán Finlay, senior policy and public affairs advisor for the National Disability Authority, said his organisation has issued new guidelines that lay out how DPOs should be consulted. 

“There was a DPO coalition called the DPO Network that was involved in the development of that strategy," said Finlay. It’s an example of co-creation, he said.

DPOs do already exist. But what this network is trying to do is to set one up for each council area, organising DPOs geographically, and putting various needs in collaboration under one umbrella, said Finlay.

At the launch

Representatives across several groups were at the launch – from the Irish Wheelchair Association and the Disability Federation of Ireland, for example. 

And Bernard Mulvany, a representative of Access for All, the disability-rights group run by his daughter, Sophia Mulvany, and co-founder Sean O’Kelly, who both use wheelchairs. 

Bernard Mulvany isn’t part of the Dublin DPO himself, he says. Because DPOs are run by, and for, disabled people. 

But he wanted to go because he sees the benefits of collaboration, he says. Some questions can be contentious across disabled spaces, he says. 

Like the question of where to put able-bodied advocates in the mix, he said. 

On the phone later, Kearns said as for the Dublin DPO, it’s going to a collective entirely of disabled people. 

He said they spent a long time developing a constitution. 

The ILMI is supporting the set-up of new DPOs around the country, in Sligo, Donegal, and elsewhere. 

They’re committed to putting disabled people directly into the conversation about their needs, said Kearns. 

Also, it’s not about labels, he said. If someone is undiagnosed, he said, “of course they can join”. Rather, he said, it’s about bias they’ve experienced. 

It’s important that the Dublin DPO grows and has an independent voice, said   Sandra Dillon, who was at the launch.

She has an invisible disability and a son who’s disabled too, and she said she loved what the Dublin DPO was about. 

"We need respect. We should demand respect, because we are struggling harder than probably anybody … just trying to get down the road, she said.  

“At the end of the day, no one knows better than the person with the disability. Nobody should be able to advise even to this area,” she said.

Kearns said it’s important to him to see more disabled people in organisations that make decisions that impact them, and he is glad to experience it at ILMI, where he works, and more than 90 percent of employees are disabled, he said. 

But he said, that's actually rare in the field. He sees DPOs as a chance for systemic change, he says.

“You really have to stand back and say, ‘Where do I focus my energy?’ Is it a protest or do I work in a systematic way to identify a change, and we have a collective mandate for that,” he said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.