ISL in the Public Sector

20 Dec 2023

The latest in UCC's DisabiliTEA series welcomed Susan O'Callaghan, Advocacy Officer and Deaf Awareness Trainer with the Cork Deaf Assocation, to speak on the ISS-Health research “Towards Ensuring Access Provision to Public Health Services for the Irish Deaf Community.”

'Welcome to the latest in a series of our DisabiliTEAs that started last year.  The theme for this is ISL in Public Bodies.  We are delighted to welcome firstly Susan O’Callaghan from the Cork Deaf Association today.  She will be speaking to the guidance for public bodies on providing access for deaf Irish sign language users, which she worked on together with Dr Gill Harold, Applied Social Studies UCC and Willie White, ISL Interpreter.

(Extract from the launch webpage: https://www.ucc.ie/en/iss21/researchprojects/researchprojects/earlieriss21projects/islaccesspublicbodies/) The main aim of the research is to design an auditing template for use by public sector bodies, for the purposes of identifying deficiencies in Deaf cultural awareness.  Susan O’Callaghan is the Advocacy Officer at the Cork Deaf Association (CDA). She is Deaf and a native user of Irish Sign Language. Susan has worked at CDA for more than 20 years and has occupied different roles there during the course of her career. Her work is now focused on community engagement with Deaf people throughout Cork city and county.

Our second speaker is Dr Noel O'Connell.  He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) and the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. Dr O’Connell is working on a project entitled “CODA: A hidden minority amongst the majority: An ethnographic study of children of deaf adults and the negotiation of threatened social identities”. The project is funded by the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme 2022.  

Unfortunately, for reasons beyond his control, Noel cannot travel to be with us today on site and we are unable to navigate the tech requirements to bring him here virtually.  Noel was going to speak on the ISS Health project, Towards Ensuring Access Provision to Public Health Services for the Irish Deaf Community, which sets out to understand the persistent gap between best practice standards and inconsistent access provision for Irish Sign Language users in public health services, towards identifying strategies to eliminate the discrimination experienced by members of the Deaf community.

Today’s talk is unusual in that both presenters are (or would have been) native ISL speakers.  The fact that this is unusual highlights how far we must yet travel in order for the Deaf community to be fully included in general society. It is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to bridge this gap, both personally and institutionally, not least on foot of the enactment of the ISL Act 2017, which has effectively made ISL the third official language of Ireland.  It is heartening to see moves elsewhere, like the development of an in-house ISL Interpreting Service for events in Trinity College Dublin, that we might look to emulate in future years. 

We are delighted to have Suzanne Carey with us again as interpreter. There is coffee and tea and there will be time for Q&A afterwards.'