Sinead Burke at UCD Festival: “Climate change is a disability justice issue.”

Sinéad Burke, writer, academic and disability activist, was in conversation with Roe McDermott at the UCD Festival on Saturday. The audience Q&A afterwards covered topics like the frustration of having an invisible disability like autism and how to manage “the rage” when confronted with ignorance towards a family member with a disability.

It was an enlightening, heartfelt session.

The previous week Sinead had attended a conference in Geneva organised by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), which seeks to reduce the impact of natural and man-made disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires.

“If an alarm goes off, and if you're a wheelchair user or a person with a mobility disability, the expectation is that you go to a refuge point and you wait for somebody to come. All of that indicates that when we are planning for disasters and risks, disabled people are not centred as part of the process, they're often consulted when a decision has already been made. And I think part of my work about being at UNDRR this week was trying to increase their ambition as to what accessibility looks like from a global perspective,” Sinead said.

This involves “continuously increasing our ambition of what dignity, agency and ease looks like” because “climate change is not going away by any stretch of the imagination. It's only increasing - and climate change is a disability justice issue. So how do we bring all of those stakeholders together for better solutions?”