Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Clonan for his powerful contribution. The Government is fully committed to the delivery of an appropriate and accessible service for children with disabilities and their families and to radical transformation in the disability sector.

The first step in that was taking disability out of the Department of Health and bringing it to the Department of equality. We all have health issues but everybody also has rights issues. It took longer than I ever intended for that extraction to take place. It took the guts of three years. It is only in the past year we have started to work within the Department of equality at getting to the root-and-branch approach required when we look at where we are with assessments of need.

Something that keeps me awake at night is the growing number of assessments of need and the fact we have not built the capacity within our CDNTs because to become an OT, physiotherapist or speech and language therapist takes four years in training. The fact we have not added those to meet the unmet need and that our teams have not full capacity keeps me awake.

Senator Clonan talked about the fight and I see it in the amount of legal challenges being brought at the moment to do with assessments of need. I look at some of the teams and wonder why they are not functioning. It is because some of them spend a lot of their time looking at complaints, as opposed to looking at interventions. The system at the moment is quite broken, to be honest, and most parents know that.My job is to ensure that I have the funding to provide the staff to go on the teams. My job is to ensure that extra higher education places are created. My job is to ensure that work permits can be granted, and that we do not just look internally but externally. My job is to work with the HSE to ensure that we can look at alternative methods of support, which is where the assistant therapist post has come from. That is why Bernard Gloster ensured that 285 were put in place within the current PDS roadmap, and that they would be funded, as we speak. Yes, we will support the Bill. I will not be opposing it, but we will have conversations from here on out.