True extent of violence against people with disabilities unknown, report’s author tells Oireachtas Committee on Disability Matters
Almost 5,000 human rights violations were identified in residential disability services in Ireland in a single year, an EU study has found.
Inspection reports of institutions accommodating disabled people described residents being punched, kicked, hit, verbally abused, and threatened.
But the true extent of abuse against disabled people in such centres is unknown as there is no nationwide database for this information, the Oireachtas Committee on Disability Matters has heard.
Detailing the Irish findings of an EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) report into violence against people with disabilities in institutions, Dr Lucy Michael said that HIQA inspection reports identified 4,825 human rights violations in residential disability services in one year.
“The HSE National Safeguarding Office recorded 13,700 safeguarding concerns in the most recent reporting period before our report, with 71 per cent relating to disabled people,” she added.
“The most commonly documented violation, making up nearly a third of all cases, was services failing to protect residents from abuse.”
Dr Michael described how residents regularly retreated to their bedrooms because they did not feel safe in communal areas.
“Restrictive practices including physical restraint, chemical sedation, locked doors, CCTV monitoring and seclusion have been used at enormous scale,” she told the Committee.
She referred to a 2022 report which showed that, over a 12-month period, 48,877 uses of restrictive practices were notified from disability residential facilities.
“Financial abuse emerged as a serious and systematic issue across all participant groups,” she outlined.
“Neglect was also widely documented, and that included residents being put to bed early, receiving cold or late meals, (and being) left in rooms for extended periods with no activity or social connection.”
Dr Michael said that ‘structural failures’, such as the lack of adult safeguarding legislation, unsafe complaint mechanisms for residents, blind spots in HIQA inspections and institutional cultures that normalise abuse are making the situation worse.
“Staff who have worked in the same settings for decades often do not recognise long-standing practices as harmful. The move to smaller group homes has not resolved this. We found smaller settings can reproduce the same power imbalances, particularly when people with complex needs are concentrated together.”
Co-author of the report Dr Rosaleen McDonagh described the findings as ‘serious’ and called for the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act to be fully implemented.
She also said that HIQA’s powers must be expanded. “It should be able to investigate individual complaints directly. Inspections must happen more frequently,” she said.
“The gap in oversight of children with disabilities placed with private providers currently inspected by Tusla rather than HIQA must be closed. These are not acceptable blind spots in a rights-based system.”
She also called for Gardaí to receive mandatory training to engage with people with disabilities. “Abuse in residential settings is a crime. It must be treated as one.”
Chief Commissioner of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Liam Herrick said, for too many people, ‘places of care are not places of safety’.
“The FRA report confirms what disabled people, their families, and advocates have been telling us for many years. Violence, coercion, financial abuse, restrictive practices, overmedication, and neglect persist in institutional settings. These harms are enabled by systemic failures: fragmented oversight, inadequate complaints mechanisms, and, critically, gaps in our legislative framework.”
He called for a renewed commitment to deinstitutionalisation within disability services. “The FRA report is unequivocal: institutionalisation itself creates the conditions in which abuse flourishes. It segregates people, limits autonomy, and concentrates power in ways that increase risk. The most effective safeguard is to ensure that people can live independently and be included in the community.”
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