On a personal level, i took the twino to town today to get a disab free bus/travel pass.
she had Social security number, photos and doc's letter.
Got to CIE after a circle many times of the main street to find a bloody disab bay, to be told she has to get the form for this signed at her local office and then get back in to town again to have it stamped and a snap taken of her!
Now it always used to be done in one at the CIE office!
If social service issues the forms why cannot twino get the pics taken at chemist and social services STAMP the form.
Save a disabled person so many trips with little access to the centre.
Mad.
Now, TOWN - I have not been in for about a year, but then i used to park the van and take the scooter out, usually doing the street with Guineys on, the one with good bronze man by the cafe on the corner!
it was crazy there today.
twin had her mobile eaten by the woolly mammoth so stopped at a place to get new one, i told her i would meet her at CIE but as i pulled away up the street, chaos reigned. Men were shooting up, drunks were in the alley ways, and many of them, a doped out woman was screaming on O'Connell street with a druggie man and i have never seen this level of deprevation in my entire life.
Every nation is begging on the street, men, women and children.
some collapsed like corpses and rubbish.
some nice men, either samaritans or born again christians were talking to one or two, one poor man obviously was a psychiatric person with depression, so beaten down just sitting on the pavement, probably not knowing where to go or what to do.
How did we let our streets become the dumping ground for the 'totally lost' from the mainstream of care?
I am sure it is because of the closure of the main big psychiatric hospitals, which were shut too hastily and nothing put in its place.
Methadone is not the answer to heroin addiction, i am convinced of that.
they sell it!
We shut everything down that could be of use to the less well off, swimming pools, libraries, drop in centres etc.
Too much of social care now is in the hands of volunteers, the professionals are being paid to be pro-active, imaginative, and are being paid!
I also believe that the 'personal touch' of the Irish, that is making a personal judgement and connection with the clients is in someways counterproductive. It obscures the reality of many situations.
My twin is right on two things: Not enough people in our country to pay taxes to fund services and too much of the 'buddy' attitude.
The level of poverty and despair i saw in Dublin City today was something way out of my understanding and it has happened so Damn quickly.
I being a visual person would have picked up these cues a year ago, a year ago i never saw someone shooting heroine into their veins in the middle of town at mid day.
Everywhere i looked there were people spaced out either on drink or drugs, and some in charge of very small babies too.
Sirens were going off from police cards, alleyways shut off with one drug addict screaming over the shoulders of another and about four or five guards and the same amount of squad cars trying to deal with this.
While my govenment quibbles about a national forum to get the country back on its feet, the feeling of a party trying to 'out another' so maybe or maybe not, our country is falling flat on the street.
i am appalled and angry, and very very sad at these developments.
AWNYAH TODAYSAY Ann living in the Republic of Ireland and it is not a good thing. We have now ratified the EU convention on the rights of people with disabilities, yet we failed in ratifying the optional protocol, allowing us ability to make complaints to the EU under the convention, with little facility to do so in our own country. We go unheard in every sense of the word. This is unjust and leaves us more vulnerable and open to abuses. We are suffering. I am suffering.
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