Call for inspector of social services

The president of the National Association for the Mentally Handicapped of Ireland (NAMHI), Ms Jean Spain, has called for an independent social services inspectorate in Ireland.

This was to ensure the public did not "continue to be faced with further reports of the distressing conditions in disability services for people with intellectual disabilities", she said.

She was speaking in the context of two recent reports in The Irish Times, one of recommendations that the Kilcornan centre for the intellectually disabled at Clarinbridge, Co Galway, be closed, due to poor standards, and another of allegations that a mildly autistic woman had been raped over an 11-year period by fellow residents at a psychiatric hospital in the midland.

She pointed out that for many years, reports of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals had drawn attention to the conditions in which people with intellectual disabilities lived in our psychiatric hospitals.

"In his most recent report \ he has particularly distressing comments to make about St Brigid's Hospital, Ballinsloe," she said.

She quoted the inspector: "Wards 2 and 4 contained high proportions of intellectually disabled persons mixed with those with mental illness ... Very few of these patients left the ward to get fresh air or to go to rehabilitation activities and most of them spent their days unoccupied".

She continued: "I think all would agree with the inspector's views that access to fresh air should be regarded as a basic human need."

It was essential that approved national standards for residential and day-care services were devised and implemented, she said.

The National Disability Authority of Ireland was currently piloting national standards for such services, which NAMHI welcomed. She urged the implementation of agreed standards without delay.