Ireland is rewriting its disability act in public, and the door now closes 9 October

By the Living Unlimited Team

Closed notice, 11 October 2026: the call for submissions closed at 5pm Irish time on Friday 9 October 2026. The department’s consultation page still carried that date when we checked on 11 October and showed no further extension. The department says a second stage of online and in-person events follows later in 2026, so this article now describes a process whose written stage has ended.

Ireland opened its main piece of disability legislation to public submissions in June, and the closing date moved. The Department of Children, Disability and Equality stated, three times on its own consultation page, that the call for submissions had been extended to Friday 9 October 2026 at 5pm. Coverage from June, and a good deal of what circulated afterward, gave the date as 9 September. That date was superseded.

We are covering this partly because the review is significant, and partly because of how the department has built the thing. The consultation is worth reading as a piece of design, whatever country you live in.

What is being reviewed

The Disability Act 2005 is now twenty-one years old. The department describes it as “a wide-ranging piece of legislation which strives to improve the quality of life for disabled people,” and says it “has not been updated in any significant manner since its enactment over 20 years ago.”

The Act defines disability, in the department’s quotation of its own statute, as “a substantial restriction in the capacity of the person to carry out a profession, business or occupation in the State or to participate in social or cultural life in the State by reason of an enduring physical, sensory, mental health or intellectual impairment.”

The review is not a tidying exercise around the edges. The stated purpose is “to inform the review of the Disability Act in its entirety.”

Recent reform work has concentrated on Part 2 of the Act, which covers the assessment of need process for children and families, and the department says that focus reflected “the urgent need to make the Assessment of Need (AON) process more effective and efficient.” The whole-Act review will involve detailed consideration of Part 2 alongside other reforms needed to advance implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It will also examine a commitment in the Programme for Government to place an autism strategy on a legislative footing.

The framing comes from Ireland’s National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People 2025 to 2030, which the department says sets out a whole-of-government approach and identifies the need to review and update existing disability legislation.

The department is careful about what the exercise can produce. The review “may result in” recommendations for legislative changes, recommendations for policy development, or recommendations for further research and consultation. That is the honest range, and it is stated up front rather than implied.

The part worth studying

Here is what a consultation looks like when the people it concerns were considered before it opened rather than after.

There are six routes in. You can email a submission to the department. You can post it, and there is a Freepost number so the postage is not a barrier. You can use an online form, which is also the route the department gives for any file too large for the 25 megabyte email limit, so a large accessible document is not a dead end. You can send audio. You can send video, and the department states that video submissions can be made in Irish Sign Language. And you can request a copy of the consultation in Braille, specifying which version of Braille you would like.

The supporting documents follow the same logic. The guidance document comes in PDF and Word, in English and in Irish, and in an Easy-to-Read version. The response template comes as an editable PDF, as Word, in English and Irish, and as an Easy-to-Read version in both fillable and print forms. There are two videos embedded on the page.

None of that is exotic. All of it is the difference between a consultation a person can answer and one they cannot. It is a useful contrast with the consultations that come and go with far less warning, such as the UN call for input on disability rights in emergencies we covered when its window was closing.

The two-stage structure matters as well. The call for written submissions is stage one. Stage two is a set of online and in-person events later in 2026, run by the department with an external facilitator. A report of the consultation process will be publicly available once it is completed. Running events after the written call, rather than instead of it, catches the people for whom a form is the wrong instrument.

Alongside all of this, the department says research is being conducted into international good practice in incorporating relevant Convention obligations into domestic legislation, over an anticipated nine-month period.

The warning inside the invitation

There is one line on the page that anyone preparing a submission should read twice.

All submissions and survey answers are subject to release under Ireland’s Freedom of Information Act 2014, and to data protection legislation. The department asks that personal, confidential or commercially sensitive information not be included, because it may be releasable under that legislation.

A disability consultation asks people to describe how a system has treated them. Doing that honestly usually means describing a diagnosis, a family, a school, or a hospital. A submission is a public document, and the department has said so plainly rather than burying it. The practical version: make the point without making the identification, unless you have decided you are content for it to be public.

One more thing to expect. The department states that submissions received will not be responded to. Individually acknowledged replies are not part of this process.

Who is being asked

The department says it wants to hear particularly from “disabled people, their families and carers, their representative groups, and Disabled Persons Organisations (DPOs),” and invites submissions from interested parties generally. If you are in Ireland, or your organization has an Irish base and something concrete to say, the routes above were open until 5pm on 9 October.

If you are reading this from Canada, the useful thing here is not the submission form. It is the fact that a government reopened a twenty-one-year-old statute in public, published its own honest range of possible outcomes, put the process in six formats and two languages before anyone asked it to, and then extended the deadline by a month. Those are choices. They are available to any government that wants to make them.

We will report what the consultation report says when it is published. Until then, this is a description of a process and a set of dates, not a verdict on Irish law.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Department of Children, Disability and Equality, Public Consultation to inform the Review of the Disability Act 2005, gov.ie (published 8 June 2026, last updated 2 September 2026, checked 11 October 2026)
• Department of Children, Disability and Equality, The National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People 2025-2030, gov.ie
• Department of Children, Disability and Equality, Assessment of Needs process: proposed changes, gov.ie