Wexford County Council: Recipients of Excellence through Accessibility award
Video
Video Transcript
Wexford County Council, Enniscorthy District Office
Voiceover: Wexford County Council’s mission is to improve the quality of life of the people of Wexford through the services it provides. The Enniscorthy District Office is a one-stop-shop sub-office of the Council, and is located in a modern building completed in 2002, housing 50 employees.
Bernie Quigley, District Coordinator, Enniscorthy District Office: An access team was assembled consisting of management and staff from the three key areas identified in the awards guidelines and that is the Information Technology section, customer services and the built environment. Our role was to implement the works highlighted in the audit and by the NDA.
Mark Roche, Clerk of Works, Enniscorthy Area: The key positive outcome is obviously seeing the change to the built environment, the vast majority of our customers would be here in this building to meet with various different departments within the council, we therefore put in a range of measures to facilitate their needs, ranging from the disabled parking spaces externally and the level access, the automatic doors on the entry does make it easy to enter the building and exit the building, we also provided a loop system, both fixed in the reception area and a portable system which can be taken into any of the meeting rooms to facilitate anybody with auditory problems and this has proved to be quite popular.
Bernie Quigley, District Coordinator, Enniscorthy District Office: I feel personally that it was a very worthwhile exercise. It has raised my awareness and its opened my eyes, its not just about the, accessibility is not just about the built enviornment, its about ensuring that all our services are accessible to all our customers now and in the future.
Adrian Doyle, Director of Services, Corporate Affairs and Roads: One of the major lessons we’ve learned from being involved in the process is that retrofit is very expensive when you come to making a building accessible for example, this building, it has cost about ten times what it would have cost if we had of incorporated the features in the original design, our building programme is quite extensive with new town offices in Enniscorthy, new County Hall and the Gorey Civic Centre which incorporates a courthouse, district offices, library etc, so we’re not going to make the same mistake again and we have proofed all these designs through the NDA and these will open at the standard of the Excellence through Accessibility and I think that will be a major step forward for the service we deliver and for the people we serve.
Apply for the Excellence through Accessibility award
If you work in a public body and would like to work with the National Disability Authority to improve the accessibility of your services and built environment, you should apply to take part in the Excellence through Accessibility award process.
E-mail the Excellence through Accessibility team at eta@nda.ie or phone them at 01-6080 400. You can also apply through our online Excellence through Accessibility Award Application form.
Page last updated: 05/18/2009