Home sweet home
bottom demonstrates I was seriously ill most of the time by now and it was a difficult life.
At the age of 72, just about, I have a long history of hall doors. The unpredictable availability in ownership of one hall door equals - belonging, love, safety and peace but definitely a place you can be yourself and most importantly be free enough to be just who you are and proud enough to be who you are.
Who you are is a learning through the decades, cultivating elements snatched from a base even if rocky but which makes understanding of self, easier. Once you are secure in yourself living a life in home should be unfettered and free.
Most of all, you can chose home to suit your needs, if you have cultivated a strong sense of attachment to calm and quiet, you can create space to suit.
If you love a garden, even a patch of earth is enough to breathe your calm listening to birdsong at dawn and dusk, you can plant to encourage feathers of millions, you are now the designer of who you want to invite.
Sound can be turned up as you chose, you can sing and dance and laugh and chatter in your own good time, in a time and place called home at the hour you chose.
Growing older is an important time of transition from ability to being dis-abled in what you have chosen for yourself. It depends on stability and how rooted you have always been. Maybe your home is there forever and you can devote your time to further enrichment but first of all the home has to be a constant. You have to have a base you can relate to in all aspects of being. We all need security.
A psychologist called Abraham Maslow believes in a hierarchy of needs in order for human beings to thrive and the basics of food, water, clothing, shelter and sleep must be met before we can address more complex needs like physical and mental health and these basic needs are prioritized for the homeless.
Maslow claims we all need and crave a purposeful life but usually these cannot be addressed until a person is grounded in the basics. Security of a home base is the first priority without which nothing would or could be achieved.
Today we recognise seven greatest needs to thrive. To meet a need is to ensure that a human being has the resources to survive, maintain life and most importantly, an internal state of wellbeing. This may be different for everyone, but a need is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
I grew up in chaos, I understood lack of safety and lack of confidence of who I was. Basically, I failed to flourish. The home was not my choosing. Children cannot chose. Life away from this base which was trembling like a constant earthquake I struggled profoundly. Although I claim that my inability to be part of society was a result of my home environment and deafness, there actually was more to it when I left.
I am a person who needs a constant and struggling to pay a rent for a roof over my head was causing further instability and nervousness on top of all I already had to contend with. What a miracle that finally I found a home, a real home. A good home once I had it I can truly say I got wings and thrived.
I did this by constructing a womb for myself. That place of safety be it beautiful or basic, it really did not matter. I made my sad place beautiful and it is part of who I am. I thrive in aesthetic places, it’s all on a level or spirit of being.
At the age of 40yrs I opened the door to No.8 and after that the door of No 21 and then No 2 and finally No 8, yet again. No 8 1 was not the same as No 8 2. Why?
Social housing at the age of forty.
It held two rooms, a small corridor, no running hot water. No bathroom or shower and a basic back door toilet. I washed with a basin by an open fire. it was HOME, in every sense of the word.
The back lane of Desmond Avenue Dun Laoghaire
The home of 8, 2 was invaded, deconstructed, manipulated by others against my wishes. The home ceased to be where I felt safe, secure and grounded. Turmoil greater than the turmoil of infants was excessive and to a point of no return. Alas, selling proved my personal downfall.
The turmoil they created for me was greater than the perceived result anticipated by a public body to sort a problem and against the law anyway as no statute or policy covers the right of a public body to demand what a person does to their property if they want to avail of the adaptation grant to their own home.
When the value placed on this home was so great I nurtured its value to me by creating a haven. The garden was very large and stupendous. Coming from a social housing unit in an x-tenement street I was ecstatic. I am and always will be at one with nature and now I had found a real meaning in my home.
Home again to be reminded is where a person can be themselves, free to express their true selves, a place of unfettered sanctuary but if multiples defile the place not because they had legal rights but had a belief they could trash my psyche and do as they wish to the place I bedded down in my personal choice and funding of a home that was to leave me penniless because I put a roof over my head.
Yet the HSE made demands greater than I was prepared to enter and these demands were excessive and illegal.
'We shall have grey tiles here," demanded the HSE OT to the builder I had secured to adapt my home.
"No 'we' will not!, I counter demanded.
"Why?" said the astonished OT glaring at me, "it will hide the dirt!"
"My dirt." the idea an OT can design your own home????
Article 40.5 of the Irish Constitution claims the following:
- Proportionality: Courts can only permit bodies such as local authorities to interfere with people’s homes if it is proportionate to do so.
- Action is ‘proportionate’ when it is appropriate and no more than necessary to address the problem concerned.
The HSE also claim that having an OT appointed during an application for an adaptation grant to your home can advise to the best course of action to take, it has no role to play in planning or mapping our your own private home nor does it have a role to demand you make changes for the future if you do not wish for such changes. In other words it has no role in coercive control over your property. There is no law for it.
The adaptation grant allows people to improve properties for their disability, it doesn’t define how this should be done, as people’s disability vary. It may have changed its use from the time I applied but at the time, it never specifically defined what I had to do to the property.
The HSE demands were not even proportionate and it is interesting to find that the OT ‘disappeared’ once the grant aid was given, the job done and I had been badly affected by a stroke event.
They even wrote to me and said that the OT had no role in an adaptation grant. This means saying I needed to tear apart my bathroom, have grey tiles to hide the dirt, trash out the front door to accommodate a wheelchair being taken in and far more besides, was both disproportionate and illegal.
The person making these demands refused to come to the home and assess it.
The property was entirely mine and in our constitution was inviolable.
The text of the Irish Constitution refers to property rights twice; the first reference being in Article 40.3. 2° where, under the heading of 'Personal Rights', it is stated that the State shall protect, as best it may, the property rights of every citizen from unjust attack.
Our constitution also protects our rights to be protected against torture, inhumane treatment.
Article 8 protects your home. The definition of home means a right to enjoy your existing home peacefully.
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
The HSE offer no grounds whatsoever in their policy where their members can insist a client in public health care alter the fabric of their home against their wishes and also any adaptation grant has to be consistent with the disability as seen as priority by the client and her consultant, in my case the neurologist. I was consistent in my aims to see my disability catered for through the life span.
I never believed we could have made a judgement and base an action on that judgement given I had no distinct medical diagnosis so any judgement was a hypothetical reasoning which could have been true or untrue and the facts could not be determined.
Would I need a wet-room in the future. No one could tell and years later I still do not.
The HSE OT demanded a wet-room and demanded I widen the frontage to the home to get a wheelchair in.
I did not want to do that as I felt it far more important to feel physically safe from intruders and attack as a rape victim. I wanted to utilise the side entrance behind which a storage shed was going to be fitted for the wheelchair.
I also felt a wet-room was not high priority and a bath used a lot was my way of easing chronic, unrelenting physical pain and also mobilizing in the home and a good wheelchair entry to the garden vital. Blocking off the side entrance as well was a safety address I needed being a deafened individual.
I felt that opening up the very small property would help my claustrophobia and mobility.
I also needed to redesign the kitchen for a wheelchair user.
The HSE only wanted to look at my washing needs and my wheelchair access and storage.
I had actually made a valid argument to all this. In the course of this adaptation grant I became so depleted my home ceased to be the home I chose, it became an abused structure by the HSE. It reeked of the ghosts of the HSE coming in repeatedly, where they discussed with builders what they wanted done with me standing helpless beside. I spent hundreds of thousands on this property. when they left, I began to feel very unsafe, insecure and traumatised. Too traumatised.
Home is heartfelt joy and rest. My home was effectively taken from me.
I remain without a home. I remain without a basic need met to thrive and live well.
I have effectively been tortured.
Despite the fact I sold a perfectly good home and garden to live out my life because I badly needed to run away from this area controlled by the people in the HSE here, I can do little to find peace nor a compensation for what they did to me.
It was on a level of torture. You have to experience it to understand. Every ounce of my being was consumed by the HSE and no matter how much I, and others, protested we never got justice and we never will.
If I have a word of advice to others, especially others who understand things like justice, human rights and personal autonomy, do not mess with the HSE for at the end of the day you have to live a life worthy of who you are. The HSE are a dysfunctional, useless organisation in its present form and as someone remarked to me only a few days ago – progress is glacial. I will not live to see progress.
There has been none in a decade and that is a long time in anyone’s life.
Walk away. Literally walk away from them.
Diagnosed with severe post traumatic stress disorder and a quality of life in the bottom 20% of the population
2017
on the postraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale she reports lifelong traumatic stressors (from childhood) but particular three events in the past years which have contributed to such stress. they are:
1. being shot at while living close to violent alcoholics in Sallynoggin (an inter-agency placement), which resulted in two suicide attempts before she moved from her community and relocated to Greystones, where she is extremely unhappy. On this issue she scores at the upper end of the moderate range of post traumatic stress disorder.
2. She has specific painful memories around the awarding of an adaptation grant for her current home, where she felt discriminated against, her personality was pathologies and she had no right of reply to accusations of aggression. the cost spiralled, her house suffered much damage and she was unhappy with the final result. She was refused an independent risk assessment. she scores in the moderate range of post traumatic stress disorder on this issue also.
3. she has extremely traumatic memories of her various contacts with the HSE which has 'annihilated my being.' she has endured ten years of criticism, disbelief, lack of service and struggles to access even basic maintenance of her various illness and disabilities. she is haunted by past contacts with the HSE and wishes strongly that they should not be a part of her future life.
On the quality of life questionnaire, Ann scores at the 22 percentile (average is 50%). the only area she achieves greater than 50% is political behaviour as she and Margaret are active in terms of disability and advocacy. she describes herself as being driven to this activity by the actions of the HSE.
there are many barriers to her improving her lifestyle including communication, pain, lack of services and financial constraint.
overall Ann's quality of life is in the bottom 20% of the population. she urgently requires a comprehensive package to fund an appropriate style of independent living with capacity to make autonomous decisions of her care needs, which she is well capable.
Neuropsychologist Assessment 2017
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