Access Media: A New Series Asks Who Gets to Tell Disabled People's Stories
By Amy Hassett
As a disabled person, I don’t often see myself or my peers reflected in stories the media tells about disability. At worst, we’re reduced to a set of symptoms. At best, to a set of achievements, stripped of context, privilege, and community. It’s a version of disability created, written and produced by people who believe they’re being neutral - because the room they’re in has no one in it to tell them otherwise. That’s the gap: between what gets called balanced coverage of disabled people, and what we recognise as our own lives. It’s the gap Disabled Women Ireland and the Disability Participation News Hub are trying to close.
Access Media is a five-part online series, running from July to November, funded by Coimisiún na Meán under its Media Skills and Development Programme. Each session brings together disabled people working in and around Irish media to talk about what needs to change, both behind the camera and in front of it.
We're doing this now because the timing feels urgent to us. There's a real pushback against equality, diversity and inclusion happening at the moment, alongside a media and information landscape increasingly shaped by misinformation and disinformation, which lands especially hard on disabled communities. There's also a pattern we felt needed naming: in periods of national upheaval and crisis, minority groups are often the first to be sidelined, their concerns treated as secondary to whatever is deemed more urgent. Ireland is having a very public conversation right now about disability, care and services, but that conversation has tended to centre on care provision rather than on disabled people's autonomy and dignity as the people it's actually about. We wanted Access Media to push back on that imbalance in how the media frames the issue.
The five-session structure wasn't arbitrary. We built it to trace the full pipeline: language and ethical storytelling, access to production spaces, representation in journalism, and representation in film, TV and broadcast media, before closing on misinformation and disinformation and its impact on disabled people specifically. Who's employed behind the scenes shapes how disabled people are spoken about on screen and in print, but getting there means structural change in how production spaces operate, practical change in how stories are researched and told, and a genuine shift in mindset among the people working across the industry. We wanted the series to hold all of that together rather than picking one piece of it.
For this series, across each of the five sessions we are bringing together Ireland’s best disabled journalists, broadcasters, producers, writers, actors and the very best of our allies to talk about how we can make the media more accessible to disabled people, and tell our stories in a better way.
These sessions have been created by Disabled Women Ireland (Ireland’s only Disabled Persons’ Organisation representing women, girls and non-binary disabled people) and the Disability Participation News Hub (a disabled-led organisation that centralises disability advocacy news). We share a conviction that informed public conversation depends on disabled people having real input into how that conversation gets shaped in the first place.
Registration for all five sessions is open via Eventbrite: