Low turnout by disabled voters is blamed on difficulty in 1balloting

Fewer than a quarter of Ireland's 350,000 people with disabilities are likely to vote in the European and local elections, the State's largest disability organisation has warned.

The National Representative Council said part of the reason for the low voting rate was the "extreme difficulty" people with disabilities had in casting their ballots.

The council's chief executive, Mr Paddy Doyle, said it was "ridiculous" that photographs of candidates were being included on the ballot in European elections, but there were still no plans to produce a Braille version.

"Polling stations are only accessible if the schools or other buildings where they are located happen to be accessible already," he added, "while the requirement to get a doctor to declare that a person is disabled before they are entitled to a postal vote makes the process unnecessarily cumbersome. Anybody who is registered as having a disability with their health boards or the National Rehabilitation Board should automatically have the right to a postal vote."

Mr Doyle blamed the low turnout by those with disabilities for a situation in which "their needs are ignored by the majority of politicians. They far outnumbered the State's 140,000 farmers, "but nobody would argue as to which is the stronger lobby. The fact is that more than 70 per cent of people with disabilities are unemployed. That statistic would simply not be tolerated - and rightly so - by a group like the farmers."

It was not an issue of for whom disabled people voted, "just that they vote. If that happened in sufficient numbers, we could clearly have a huge influence in forcing change in the political system, which would bring us in from the margins of society and enable us to gain a greater share in Ireland's economic prosperity.

"Politicians need to see the weight of the disabled vote. We need to become more politicised and to start realising that politicians are nothing more than temporary employees of us, the electorate."

Representatives of the 2,100-member NRC will be lobbying those with disabilities over the next few days to persuade them to use their votes on June 11th.