Ireland at the bottom of Europe’s disability employment league

Ireland may be Europe’s star pupil when it comes to economic performance, but our report card for the number of people with disabilities in employment makes for quite dismal reading.

The European Commission Country Report for Ireland 2022 revealed that Ireland has the largest disability employment gap in the EU, at 38.6 per cent. This compares very unfavourably with the EU average of 24.4 per cent. The report also noted that fewer than one-third of people with disabilities in Ireland were employed in 2019.

“I think the statistics tell us people with disabilities are not being included in the workforce sufficiently well,” says Daphne Ahrendt, senior research manager, social policies, with Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. “It’s clearly not working. The legislation is there and nothing prevents them from working from a rights point of view. But the reality is different.”

The overall statistics are very poor, Ahrendt adds. “Ireland is among the worst in Europe. In 2020 32.6 per cent of people with disabilities in Ireland were employed. The EU average was 51.3 per cent.”

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Like all statistics, these numbers only tell part of the story but a deeper look into the data scarcely improves the picture.

“Ireland has the lowest proportion of people with disability working full time in Europe, at 23 per cent,” says Ahrendt. “To make it even worse, the proportion of women with disabilities working full time is only 15 per cent.”

She does note a slight improvement during the pandemic but this may be anomalous.

“We saw that there was a bit of progress between 2019 and 2020 but the problem with the statistics is that they are a bit out of date. They are from quite a while ago and the improvement was mainly during Covid, which was a very different situation. The improvement could be a temporary glitch.”

“It’s fair to say that as a nation, disability is one of the areas we are weakest on still in the workplace,” says Prof Maeve Houlihan, associate dean and director of UCD Lochlann Quinn School of Business. “The dial is stubbornly slow to change and, in an Irish context, studies show that only between 30 per cent and 36 per cent of Irish people with disabilities are employed.”

Houlihan highlights the additional challenges faced by people with disabilities seeking to enter the workforce. “In terms of level playing fields, the distance having to be travelled by individuals with physical disabilities can be extreme and unjust,” she notes. “The extra work that has to be done in a world not designed for inclusion – going right back through the talent pipeline to universities, colleges, schools, to get to where you are capable of – is significant when there are physical barriers in place.”

The fact remains that we live in a world not designed for universal access, Houlihan adds. “Whether that is getting to college in a wheelchair, accessing materials as a blind person or progressing in education when you have periods of absence or illness, the immediate physical barrier can be a metaphorical and literal barrier to that job that truly reflects your ability and potential. The risk of marginalisation, underrepresentation and underemployment is high and is showing in our employment figures in the context of a war for talent.”

There are no simple answers to the issue, according to Ahrendt. “Our own studies have found many reasons for it,” she adds. “It’s a complex story. There is no easy recipe to fix the problem. If you have legislation in place you would think the first thing to do is educate employers. We need to look more carefully at that. Do employers understand their obligations to provide equal access? There is also probably a need to enforce the legislation more strictly.”

That would be a start but there are other issues at play. “It’s multidimensional and disadvantage starts at an early age,” says Ahrendt. ‘People with disabilities probably don’t have equal access to education to begin with. And even if the figures are improving, we are not seeing improvements in pay equality. When they are in employment people with disabilities tend to be in low paying or part-time roles. Sometimes we even see blatant discrimination and employers not paying people according to the law.”

Ahrendt believes there is a need for additional funding from both Government and the EU to help Ireland catch up on its European peers. This could be used to assist both individuals and employers.

“There is too much putting onus on employers to put measures in place,” she says. “There is also too much onus on individuals to vindicate their own rights. That can be a huge burden on an individual. Even when they are able to do it, they still come across many obstacles and barriers. It seems that at every step of the game there is another barrier. When they manage to overcome the barriers to education they have to find an employer who will provide reasonable accommodation for them to do the job.”

And that’s another problem, as reasonable accommodation is not properly defined at present. “The EU is working on guidelines for a definition of reasonable accommodation,” says Ahrendt. “It’s a difficult case to prove at present.”

There are also structural barriers within existing support systems. “The way the social protection system is set up, it can be unaffordable for people with disabilities to enter the workforce,” Ahrendt adds. “They risk losing so many supports. In more extreme cases, if they get a good job they may not need their disability allowance but they can lose their right to transport and can’t get to work. We need to look at it systemically and consider how all the different elements are linked to each other. Part of the problem lies with having responsibility dispersed across different actors in different departments and agencies.”