A Kilkenny councillor is backing calls for the Abbey Quarter development to be made more wheelchair-friendly.
It’s after a local family carer outlined a plea at last week’s meeting of the Strategic Policy Committee.
Fiona O’Neill had told the meeting that a standardised ‘changing place facility’ for disabled adults and teenagers was badly needed within the project.
And Green Cllr Maria Dollard told KCLR News that’s something she can understand, noting “I’m a family carer myself so I’m very fully aware of the challenges that family carers have to endure and indeed the people that are being cared for and sometimes their voices are not heard and I suppose because they’re not able to sometimes speak out as forcibly we often forget that they are there and it was a very powerful plea for help but from my perspective, my idea would be that it shouldn’t be a plea it should be bedded down in legislation and I suppose that’s what we’re working towards at Government level as well”.
She adds “The view we would be taking is that we’re trying to get to a place where we can embed the requirement for a changing place facility in all new public buildings and that would be the starting point and I suppose with the development of the Abbey Quarter I think it was very timely that Fiona call for it to be placed in the Abbey Quarter”.
And Cllr Dollard says there are benefits to putting such structures in place, saying “From a human rights perspective we must provide these services but also from an economic perspective, all of these people have money to spend, they come they like to go to visit these places like anybody else and if you maybe go down to the Arboretum near Leighlinbridge, it’s very wheelchair accessible, on any weekend you’ll see family groups out there, you’ll see wheelchair users, people will go where the facilities are”.
