It is certain the statutory deadline of 26 April will not be met. We all agree on that. We have been left with a very messy way to approach legislation. It is very disappointing that we are only now debating these important changes, that we are doing it at the very last possible hour and that the Government is rushing these incomplete changes through without the benefit of pre-legislative scrutiny. We are doing so because the wards of court deadline will not be met. I too thank the Centre for Disability Law and Policy in University of Galway for the note it provided for us. It was very useful. I have been at a number of briefings and spoken to a lot of stakeholders on the issue. It is complex but very resolvable. By the end of January, only 323 wards of court had discharged from wardship, with 78% of the 1,472 cases still pending. I do not believe this Bill will address the issues that has led to the court backlog. The root causes have not been addressed. These include the lack of support available to people in the process and a failure to have the Act properly explained to them in language understandable to everyone. Rights campaigners have told me there is a lack of appropriate accessible information and practical supports for the wards and their families. The legal profession may not have sufficient numbers with the skills and experience to support the discharge process, which is also a concern for me. The public bodies tasked with the implementation of the Act, such as the Legal Aid Board, the National Advocacy Service and the Decision Support Service remain both understaffed and under-resourced. It was not just Oireachtas Members who were denied the opportunity to engage on this important change. Disability rights advocates have been highly critical of the approach taken by the Government. For instance, Disabled Women Ireland, in its submission on the draft heads, noted it was offered a single 30-minute session with the Minister of State on 28 January, which its representatives attended without being provided advance information on the heads of the Bill. This was circulated to them days afterwards, when their opportunity to query the Bill with the Minister of State had passed. Disabled Women Ireland was not the only interested party to note the lack of engagement. The Centre for Disability Law and Policy in University of Galway noted the lack of meaningful engagement with those who will be most specifically impacted by these changes, namely, wards and their families. The Bill will not address the shortcomings in the current system. We need to hear from the Minister of State how these will be addressed. Furthermore, the extension provided in the Bill will need to be re-extended beyond the proposed 18-month timeframe and I fear we will be back here debating similar legislation. I am concerned that these changes are being made without adequate consideration of the wishes of those most impacted by them. The Bill seeks to provide legal certainty in wardship cases by enabling wardships to be extended. It is concerning that there is a specification that only some wardships will be extended in certain circumstances. The criteria on activating extensions of the timeframe in specific cases are extremely vague and there is no requirement to fully engage with wards of court detailed in the Bill. The Bill allows for judges to determine when an extension to the deadline for wardship is required but lacks detail on what the exceptional circumstances to allow such an extension are. This is placing an extreme amount of power in the hands of these individual judges to extend the length of time somebody can be denied their decision-making rights. The Bill should have and could have been more definitive by allowing extensions in circumstances where it had not been possible to inform the ward of their rights in an appropriate and accessible manner. Ultimately, limited extensions in these undefined certain circumstances mean that wards and their committees may not have time to engage with those who can appropriately support decision-making options. What is further absent from the Bill is the right of wards to be afforded time, training and information to take up supported decision-making options. Wards should be afforded the opportunity to understand their rights, express their will and develop skills to engage with supported decision-making. The Bill provides no requirement to engage with wards during the proceedings; rather, they only need to be notified of discharge proceedings. Another concern is how this Bill may discriminate against minor wards. The extension of the deadline from six to 18 months for child wards creates an unnecessary delay in young people being able to exercise their decision-making rights as others can do. A glaring failure of the Bill is that it does not address the non-compliance of the Act with the State's obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Act is not compliant due to its approach to the functional assessment of capacity, which leads to the denial of legal capacity. At the time of the passing of the Act, the Centre for Disability Law and Policy outlined the ways in which compliance with the convention could and should have been improved. Today, the Minister of State has presented us with a Bill that prior to now has not adequately engaged with the most important stakeholders in the process and has been fast-tracked due to the Minister of State leaving it to the last minute to implement it to avoid pre-legislative scrutiny. It is not complaint with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, it does not address the major problems with the Act itself and it discriminates against young people, denying them the opportunity to engage in an element of the decision-making process. I stated earlier that this is a very messy way to do legislation. It is an appalling way to do legislation, dictating to a stakeholder without adequate engagement. The Minister of State simply must be aware of that.

Sentiment score: 0.09