FLOYD Morris, president of the last Senate, says the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) does not just pay lip service to people with disabilities, but empowers them.

Morris, who was president of the Senate for the past four years, told a PNP meeting in Old Harbour, St Catherine on Saturday night that if it were not for the Portia Simpson Miller-led Administration, the Disabilities Act might have stayed on some shelf somewhere gathering dust.

“This is the party that stands up for people with a disability,” he told his fellow Comrades.

Morris said that the Disabilities Act was tabled in 2003, but when the Jamaica Labour Party took over in 2007, for four years very little was done on the legislation, Morris said. “When the Portia Simpson Miller Administration regained control of the Government in 2011, the Act was moved through the Parliament and Senate and is now law.

He did not say, however, why nothing was done about the Act between its tabling in 2003 and 2007 when the PNP lost power.

The Act made “people with disabilities the same as every other Jamaican”, Morris said.

“Others only talk about disabled persons. The PNP and Portia Simpson Miller act on their word,” he told the PNP rally.

Morris urged the disabled to support and vote for the PNP on Thursday, and for all Jamaicans to urge their friends with disabilities to go out and vote for the PNP.

Morris said, too, that he was a product of the policies of the PNP toward the disabled. “It was through these policies that, as a blind man, I was able to get a second chance.”

He said he was first appointed a senator by former PNP president and prime minister, PJ Patterson, while at the University of the West Indies, and was later appointed a parliamentary secretary.

Morris was reappointed a senator by Prime Minister Simpson Miller and was subsequently elected as president.