President Mary McAleese has made a plea for better access to education and employment for Ireland's disabled.
At a lecture this morning, the first in series on living with disabilities in Ireland, Mrs McAleese said the country had some "distance to travel" in helping such citizens reach their potential.
"In so many deeply embedded and insidious ways our disabled citizens find themselves in cul de sacs which are frustrating and dispiriting," she told the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability (Ahead) audience.
Mary McAleese
Moves by the education sector - including establishing disability officers and moving away from segregated to mainstream education - were "healthy signs", but unemployment rates for people with a disability, including graduates, remained much higher, she said.
She said access to education was at the heart of "dignity and freedom" and that too many people with disability faced blocks.
She highlighted the plight of a wheelchair-bound man who had applied to do medicine but had been rejected despite achieving straight "As". "The reason he was excluded was that the buildings he would need to access as a medical student were unsuited to wheelchairs," the president said.
Mrs McAleese said growing numbers of young adults with disability had grown up with disability and equality legislation that had sharpened their awareness and the world needed to be ready for them.
There was momentum in Ireland for a society in which the disabled lived lives as independent and fulfilled as is humanly possible, she said. "It is only when we arrive at that Ireland that we can say we have completed the ideal of our Republic."
The lecture series - "Disability And Contemporary Ireland' - has been organised by Ahead and will bring together disabled organisations in an effort to change employment structures and practice.