People with disabilities still faced significant barriers in accessing education and gaining employment, the President, Mary McAleese, said yesterday.
Delivering the inaugural lecture in the Get Ahead lecture series on disabilities in UCD yesterday, the President said unemployment rates for people with a disability were still high, and disabled people were being left "frustrated and dispirited" by the barriers they faced.
The lecture series was organised by the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability (Ahead), which aims to ensure people with disabilities get full access to higher education and to secure employment for graduates.
"In so many deeply-embedded and insidious ways, our disabled citizens find themselves in cul de sacs which are frustrating and dispiriting," Mrs McAleese said.
"It is not so long ago that I met a young man who was wheelchair bound and had applied to do medicine, but had been rejected even though he had straight As in all his exams. The reason he was excluded was that the buildings he would need to access as a medical student were unsuited to wheelchairs.
"Right here and now, unemployment rates for people with a disability, including graduates, remain much greater than for their non-disabled peers," Mrs McAleese continued.
"That tells us the old barriers are still holding more firm than we would like. Thankfully, commendable work is being done to identify and challenge the barriers to recruitment of graduates with disabilities in order to bring about reform."
The President, whose younger brother, John, is profoundly deaf, said it was only in the past decade that any profoundly deaf-from-birth students had been admitted to an Irish university, but that they still faced obstacles.
"If you or I decide we want to do a 10-week evening course in, say, art or computers next autumn at the usual modest cost of, say €100, it is a simple process. If you are deaf and can communicate best by sign language, it will cost you €1,500 to employ a sign language interpreter to accompany you to the course; that is if you can find one."
She said the lead taken by the higher education sector in recent years - through the introduction of disability officers, access programmes and cross-community partnerships - was "very reassuring."
"The move away from segregated education to mainstream education is another healthy sign of a more integrated, sensitive and effective world to come.
"There is a critical mass of ambitious children and young adults with disability forming, and we have to ensure that world is ready for them."
She said organisations like Ahead and Fás were pioneering initiatives to support young people with disabilities entering the workforce, and she particularly welcomed Ireland's first graduate fair specifically for graduates and students with disabilities.