Cork event shows realities of life in a wheelchair

RUGBY player CJ Stander was among the attendees who took part in a recent event aimed at highlighting the difficulties that people using a wheelchair experience on a daily basis.

The Spinal Injuries Ireland’s event, A Day In My Wheels, took place at Cork’s County Hall.

It was attended by businesses and individuals who contributed €5,000 to take part — either fundraised or donated through company corporate social responsibility budgets — which will directly support the 2,300+ individuals in Ireland with spinal cord injury and their families.

Attendees on the day heard from Kevin Dempsey, Development Manager of the Disability Federation of Ireland who explained that there are 650,000 people in Ireland living with a disability, and 1.1 million or 22% of the population have at least one long-lasting condition, according to the most recent census.

Despite this high figure, people with disabilities are the “largest untapped source of labour”, he said, adding that despite studies showing the benefits of having a diverse workforce, many businesses are not accessible enough to hire people with disabilities.

Participants were then invited to borrow a wheelchair and try to navigate various tasks, such as moving around cones, then doing it in reverse, getting up and down a ramp, and even crossing the busy main road.

The aim of the event was to encourage companies to think about accessibility, and to then return to their workplace and make changes.

Several ambassadors from Spinal Injuries Ireland were on hand to advise the participants about how to navigate their way around in wheelchairs.

Among those in attendance was Richard Murray, or Rich as he is known, who was born able-bodied, but had to relearn everything after he fell on his back during a boat trip with his friends in 2021.

After a week at The Mater, where he underwent surgery, Rich spent three months in Cork University Hospital, before being transferred to the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH), where he first met the Spinal Injuries Ireland team, who have been in “constant contact” with him since.

Rich said that he “got lucky” as he could keep his job, which allows him to work from home. He said that because he and his fiancé had just put down the foundation of their house, they were able to redesign it to be more accessible.

Despite these positives, he says there are a huge amount of things that he can’t do now, due to the world not being set up for people who use a wheelchair.

He explained that though now his eye is trained to immediately register whether or not a place is accessible, it was something he’d never paid any attention to before.

“Almost every home is not accessible in some way — if there’s two stories I can’t get upstairs.

“A few friends moved into new houses and we’d go to visit, I’d have to ask my partner to go upstairs and tell me what it was like.”

Speaking about the A Day In My Wheels event, he said: “It’s always nice to be around other people in my situation, they know what you’re going through without even having to tell them.

“In the NRH especially you’re surrounded by people like that, but then you’re back out in the real world and you’re the only one in your environment in a wheelchair.”

He said that he had observed people having to navigate and think differently about their access for the first time about things he considers on a daily basis and that he could relate to them.

“If you sat me in a chair three years ago I would have struggled,” he said. “When we were crossing the road, there was a curb and even CJ Stander had to think twice about how to get over it properly — that curb was about an inch high and it slowed everybody down.”

He commented that he noticed people who weren’t part of the event staring as participants crossed the road in wheelchairs, and says this is part of his daily life.

“If you’re in a chair and you’re the only one, everybody looks at you — man, woman, child, dog they’ll all stop and look at you.

“It’s another thing you don’t get until you’re in a chair, you can hear cars slowing down when they pass to look at you, like me walking the dog at night is a fairly unique sight.”

Rich said that places in Cork have “very varying degrees of accessibility”, but said it makes a big difference when they make changes in that regard.

“There’s a drive-through coffee shop in Little Island called Crush Coffee that I always go to, and I noticed that they’d replaced a gravel sitting area with tiles”, he said, adding that he spoke to the owner who said he is also planning to put a ramp in over a curb.

Rich said it gave him hope to see this improvement from when he first became a wheelchair user, saying: “even in my length of time in a wheelchair I see a spot making these changes.”

But it continues to be a source of stress for Rich and others like him, as he explains: “I’m going on honeymoon in two weeks and the worry that it might be inaccessible is huge - but we’re just going to stay positive.”

He added: “There’s a long way to go in that regard, but 50 or 100 years ago what chance would you have to a life? Now there’s progress being made all the time.”

For more information on the work of Spinal Injuries Ireland see https://spinalinjuries.ie/.