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Sinéad Burke graduated top of her class in her primary school teaching course and won an academic award, yet she says she “struggled” to work full-time in a classroom that was not designed for someone with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism.
Burke is now chief executive of Tilting the Lens, an accessibility consultancy with a team based in Ireland, the UK (including Northern Ireland) and Germany. She is among 41 per cent of people in Ireland with a disability who are in work, or about half the general employment rate. That gives Ireland one of the largest disability employment gaps among OECD members.
“There is a lack of ambition, a lack of understanding and a lack of representation of disabled people as leaders,” Burke says.
But Ireland is not alone. Around the world disabled people are disproportionately excluded from the workforce, meaning they are more likely to live in poverty and face social exclusion. This comes at a price for societies, costing trillions of dollars in GDP every year, the World Bank has estimated.
Meanwhile, progress on closing the gap has stalled. A 2023 report by the European Disability Forum found that EU countries have made no measurable progress, compared with the period before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The OECD in 2019 published the most recent attempt to compare the employment gap. Its report appeared to defy broader labour market strength: the widest gaps were in Ireland and the US, while poorer countries such as Mexico and Chile were among the most equal.
Mark Priestley, professor emeritus of disability policy at the University of Leeds, cautions that making direct comparisons is difficult, saying that nations may differ in how they record or classify disabilities. “Countries with high employment levels for the general population do not necessarily have high employment levels for disabled people,” Priestley says. “So policies must make a difference.”
Data from Ireland and Chile mark the contrast between the two economies, especially in light of their policies.
Ireland is almost at full employment yet statistics show little progress on getting disabled people into work. Emer Begley, director of advocacy and inclusion at the Disability Federation of Ireland, says that, although there are several government programmes in place to encourage employers to hire disabled workers, they suffer from limited uptake and awareness among organisations and disabled people.
“People can be reluctant to even name the reasonable accommodations they need, whether that’s flexible working, aids and appliances to support their work, or quiet rooms,” she says. “They have to fight hard to get them then when they do name them.”
A recent study from Ireland’s Human Rights and Equality Commission and the Economic and Social Research Institute outlines how much individual households that have a person at home with a disability must spend. A family that includes somebody with severe limitations faces a cost of disability as high as 93 per cent of their disposable income. Disabled people are also almost four times more likely than non-disabled to face severe deprivation, according to EU data.
However, the biggest problem Begley sees is a “lack of joined-up thinking” across government departments. For instance, many disabled people may drop in and out of work, or prefer to work part-time. But doing so often means they lose access to benefits such as free travel or a medical card that entitles them to free GP care. “They may be able to work, but it’s actually that barrier of losing benefits that keeps them out of the labour market,” she says.
Chile’s GDP per capita is one-sixth that of Ireland’s while its overall employment rate is lower. But its disability employment gap is less than half that of Ireland’s, the OECD found.
Ignacia López, a labour law expert and partner at leading Chilean law firm Cariola Díez Pérez-Cotapos, gives credit to the 2018 Labour Inclusion Act, which introduced a quota of at least 1 per cent of registered disabled workers at large organisations, for the country’s progress in this area. Each company must also employ someone to oversee the inclusion of people with disabilities.
A 2024 study by the Inter-American Development Bank found the quota system resulted in 15.8 per cent more disabled workers at eligible businesses.
Researchers say, however, that some of the growth was because more people registered as disabled as a result of the law, not that companies hired more disabled workers.
Ivanna José Sáez Cuevas, executive director of Fundación Con Trabajo, says work remains to be done. For example, disabled children attend separate schools that do not issue high school diplomas, locking many out of the labour market. The Chile-based non-profit organisation, which helps people with cognitive disabilities into work, says often employers are over-protective of their disabled staff and fail to take their skills seriously.
Sáez Cuevas believes that Chile has a strong culture of accepting and including disabled people. “So we are not starting from zero.”
