Left to Right: Shane Vince Coulter (Former GSU President), Pat & Kate Rath (parents of Dr Rath), Professor Neville Cox (Registrar) it, across institutions and at a national level, through a range of age brackets. A member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Disability Advisory Committee, he has a role in monitoring the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the republic. He has also been appointed to the National Disability Authority Board and is chair and founder of the Trinity Forum for Disabled Staff and Postgraduate Students, a representative group to increase the representation of disabled staff in higher education. ‘It's very exciting working with the Centre, and it's also extremely rewarding for me to have the opportunity to empower young people and to help them develop the skills that will be important for them as they develop and engage in our community. But what's equally important is that we understand how those graduates see success and whether they feel like they belong in our larger Trinity community, and what that means to them.’ Closer involvement with the community, and his own experience as a disabled person, led to the posing of more and deeper questions. Research revealed, for example, that disabled students made up 8.1% of undergraduates, but only 3% of postgraduates, suggesting that the mass of visible and invisible barriers to continuing into postgraduate study were just too onerous for many people. After Vivian became chair and founder of the National Disabled Postgraduate Advisory Committee, a meeting with then minister Simon Harris and support from an organisation called AHEAD led to the HEA three-year funded LaunchPAD Community, seeking among other goals, to ‘Sustain the Community to Make a Lasting Impact Through Advocacy and Influence in HE Decision-Making’. Creating links and ripples that reach out far and wide from College Green, it is clear that Dr Rath experiences no shortage of energy. All of the institutional moving and manoeuvring underlines that these are areas needing deep structural change. All too often, not only the formalities of what constitutes ‘accessibility’ and ‘inclusion’, but also the conceptualisations of disability and who gets to belong itself have simply been created without any or much input from disabled persons. Their participation therefore needs to begin long before the final decision, at the level of understanding of the lived experience. An interviewee on The Tommy Tiernan Show, a winner of awards for his advocacy and a researcher into complex niches, Dr Rath somehow finds the time to both measure the problems and move to change things, all at the same time.
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