Unemployment affects 76% of those with spinal injury, research finds

More than three quarters (76 per cent) of people with a spinal cord injury (SCI) in Ireland are unemployed and 40 per cent are living at or below the poverty line, new research has found.

The research involving face-to-face interviews with 385 people, representing 24 per cent of those with a spinal injury, was commissioned by Spinal Injuries Ireland (SII) and carried out under the guidance of psychologist Dr Katrina Collins.

It found that pain is rated as the issue having the greatest impact on the quality of life of those with such an injury. This was followed by personal care and spasm issues.

Some 42 per cent of those interviewed reported that family members were their main support. Over half (53 per cent) of those who use family members as daily support are over 55 years.

Some 35 of participants in the study believed service providers were not knowledgeable about spinal cord injury - including local hospitals, community services and GPs.

Some 1,600 people in Ireland live with a spinal injury. The most common causes are road traffic accidents (30 per cent), medical (28 per cent) and domestic (12 per cent) and industrial accidents (12 per cent) followed by sports (7 per cent).

A total of 73 per cent of those with the condition are male and 27 per cent are female. Three quarters of those with SCI use wheelchairs.

Chairman of SII James McCarthy said it cost approximately €730,000 a year to run the organisation. Some €330,000 of this came from the State, either through the HSE or the Department of Social Protection.

The target of finding an additional €400,000 through fundraising was currenly falling short, he said.

“That is a key challenge for us. The recent bad publicity associated with some charitable organisations has reflected right across the community in, I have to say, an incredibly unfair way.”

He said the public response had been to “pull back” and the organisation had found its donations had “fallen off really noticeably” since the publicity associated with some of those organisations.

“As an organisation, we aspire to meet the absolute highest standards and I would like to think that we generally succeed in doing that. So we certainly feel pretty aggrieved that we have felt the brunt of the response to some other organisations who haven’t necessarily met those high standards.”

He said when Minister for Finance Michael Noonan was considering “loosening the purse-strings” in the Budget, he had at the people who needed the money the most.

Dr Collins said it was the first large scale study of its kind in Ireland “offering a unique insight into the multitudinous aspects of living with a SCI”.

“The study provides robust data which is rich in individual experience gathered from a representative sample of SII members across all the counties in Ireland.

“The information contributes significantly to an international evidence base which affirms strategic necessities of NGOs like SII and the Government to advocate for the rights of persons with an SCI.”

Data from the research has been used to develop a four-year strategy entitled Engage, Empower, Enhance, aimed at bringing the employment rates of people with SCI more in line with the European average of 51 per cent employment and in particular Switzerland which has an 80 per cent employment rate for people with spinal cord injury.

The full report is available at spinalinjuries.ie