Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." As Minister for Children, Disability and Equality, I am pleased to introduce to the House today the Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026. This Bill is the first legislative reform of the assessment of need process since it was established in the Disability Act 2005, over 20 years ago. This Bill is an acknowledgement by Government that the current assessment of need process has to become a source of deep frustration for applicants, both children and young adults, and indeed for their families. The Government is particularly mindful that long waiting times for assessment of need are causing uncertainty and distress to families who may already be under considerable pressure as they try to ensure their family member receives the supports and services they need in order to fully develop and thrive. In my statement today I will set out section by section the proposed changes being introduced by this Bill and how these legislative reforms aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the assessment of need system. Section 1 of the Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026 defines the Disability Act 2005 as the principal Act. The Bill which comprises a total of eight sections only makes very specific and targeted changes to Part 2 of the Disability Act which describes and sets out the legislative basis for the assessment of need process. Section 2 of the Bill makes specific and targeted changes section 7 of the principal Act which sets out interpretations of terms used within Part 2. In particular, the Bill strengthens the definition of "assessment" in section 7(1) to clearly identify the determination of disability as a distinct part of the assessment process. It seeks to make explicit what was previously implicit in the principal Act, notably the requirement for HSE assessment officers to make the determination of disability before identifying the health and education needed the applicant. Additionally, section 2 amends the definition of substantial restriction in section 7(2) of the principal Act. Specifically, the Bill replaces the word "disability" with the word "restriction", placing greater emphasis on the need of the individual arising from the restrictions they face in daily life. It brings the legislation more in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, focusing on the person's needs rather than their disability. Section 3 of the Bill makes amendments to section 8 of the principal Act. The Bill clarifies that a request by a HSE assessment officer to the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, for assistance in relation to the need for an education service as part of the overall assessment process, should be made once a determination of disability has been established. Section 3 also clarifies that the assessment report prepared and issued by the HSE assessment officer will include a statement on the substantial restriction that the applicant is subject to. This new provision replaces a requirement for an assessment report to include "a statement of the nature and extent of the [person’s] disability", moving away from a focus on diagnosis. This will help to ensure the focus is on the restrictions experienced by the person and their needs arising from those restrictions, rather than on a specific impairment or diagnosis. Section 4 inserts an entirely new set of provisions to section 9 of the principal Act. These new provisions provide for the withdrawal, closure and reinstatement, where required, of applications for an assessment of need, AON. These provisions address a gap in the existing legislation, which does not provide for the closure of applications. They also aim to provide a degree of flexibility to applicants and their families who may not wish to continue with their application due to personal circumstances or may not be in a position to engage with the process at that point in time. This should also provide for improved case management by the HSE, allowing for the closure of dormant or inactive applications currently in the system. As I will explain, substantial protections will also be in place at all times for every applicant so that this provision operates in everyone’s best interest. The Disability (Amendment) Bill provides for two types of withdrawal. The first is a voluntary withdrawal mechanism whereby the applicant voluntarily chooses to withdraw their application from the assessment of need process. The applicant can withdraw their application at any stage throughout the assessment process up to the point at which a service statement is issued and the applicant must inform the HSE in writing of their intent to withdraw. The voluntary withdrawal will take effect on the date at which the HSE receives this notice from the applicant. The second type of withdrawal mechanism is termed a "deemed withdrawal" and will only occur when it is no longer possible to progress the assessment process. Regulations, which are at an advanced stage of development, will set out very clearly the conditions under which the HSE can act upon a deemed withdrawal. These will include, for example, where the applicant is deceased, has permanently moved outside the jurisdiction or fails to provide the necessary information over a six-month period despite repeated efforts by the assessment officer to progress the assessment process. The deemed withdrawal would take effect on the date at which the HSE notified the applicant. Importantly, the Bill also has regard to the potential vulnerability of families and provides that there is an option to reinstate applications to the AON process for both voluntary and deemed withdrawals, even in those cases where attempts to elicit information over a six-month period have failed. In each withdrawal case, a request for reinstatement can be made by the applicant within 12 months of the date of withdrawal. This allows applicants who may have disengaged from the process for personal reasons to re-engage and have their original applications assessed. The Bill sets out how applications will be treated once they have been reinstated, especially in relation to steps that had already been taken to process the application at the time of withdrawal. In all, these new provisions for withdrawal, closure and reinstatement will apply to both existing and new applications to the assessment of need process and will ensure greater flexibility in how applications are managed across the system. Section 5 of the Bill makes changes to section 21 of the principal Act. Section 5 provides the Minister for Children, Disability, and Equality with regulation-making powers in relation to the provision for the withdrawal, closure and reinstatement of applications to the assessment of need process. The regulations, which are in development, specify the conditions under which withdrawals, closures and reinstatements can take place, enhancing protections for applicants to ensure that this provision is grounded in legislation and does not exceed the limits of the principal Act. Section 5 also makes an amendment to section 21(a)(v) of the principal Act around requests for assistance from the NCSE. This is to reflect the changes made to section 3 of the Bill whereby a request to the NCSE for assistance should be made once a determination of disability has been established Section 6 provides the Minister for Children, Disability, and Equality with the powers to request the HSE to develop a set of statutory guidelines setting out the assessment of need process. It is intended that the statutory guidelines will support HSE assessment officers and liaison officers to deliver a consistent and uniform approach to the processing of assessment applications across all six health regions, promoting greater fairness and transparency. The guidelines also ensure that the overall assessment process is grounded in legislation and does not exceed legislative parameters. The guidelines, which are currently at an advanced stage of development, are procedural in nature. They will cover all aspects of the assessment process from an administrative perspective. This includes the initial processing of new applications right through to how the withdrawal and reinstatement of applications should be conducted by assessment officers. Over time, it is expected that a standardised process for the delivery of assessments of need will make the system more efficient and effective, helping to reduce processing times. The guidelines will also provide greater clarity about the assessment of need process for applicants and their families so that they can better understand what happens when they make an application. Section 7 provides for the transitional arrangements to address the changes introduced in the Bill and how they will apply to new and existing applications. Applications received by the HSE on or after the date at which the new Act commences will be processed under the new legislation. Applications received by the HSE before the date of commencement of the new Act, where no steps have yet been taken to carry out the assessment, will also be processed under the new legislation. Meanwhile, applications on hand with the HSE on the date of commencement of the new Act, where steps have been taken by the HSE before that date, will be processed in line with the existing legislation set out in Part 2 of the principal Act. This means that the HSE will be required to administer two systems for the processing of assessments of need until such time as all applications received prior to the commencement of the new Act are completed. These two systems will be similar in many aspects, other than those set out in the Bill. However, as I mentioned previously, an exception to the transitional provisions will be the provisions for the withdrawal, closure and reinstatement of applications. These provisions will apply to all new and existing assessment of need applications, giving all applicants the right to withdraw, close and reinstate their applications as per the new Act and regulations. Section 8 of the Bill is the Short Title and addresses commencement. I recognise that many families turn towards an assessment of need at a vulnerable time in a child or young adult’s life, as they seek to identify their needs and the services that may be available to meet those needs. However, I must emphasise that an assessment of need is not required to access services and I highlight that a person seeking services, whether for themselves or their child, can apply directly to the HSE for those services without an AON. Nevertheless, the statutory right to an assessment of need as set out in the Disability Act 2005 remains absolutely unchanged. The legislation I have presented today showcases the Government’s commitment to improving the assessment of need experience for those who seek an assessment of need. Of course, legislative reform should only be one aspect of our focus, and I am committed as Minister to working with my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, and across Government on improving access to services for some of our most vulnerable children. I commend the Bill to the House.

On some level, this is a technical Bill, but because it deals with assessment of need, the Minister will understand that there is a huge level of trepidation and worry out there about the delivery of a service that has seen abject failure over many years. We know that the reason this is being tackled is because, at last count at the end of June, we had 23,282 children on the waiting list for an assessment of need. That was 1,286 in Louth. That is a phenomenal amount of families. We all know that even those who have got an assessment of need do not necessarily get the service plan in the time required, nor do they receive the therapies and supports, which is the biggest issue that remains for families. I would like to think when we are introducing legislation on assessment of need that there would be some glimpse of light in terms of how we are going to deliver. Regarding this legislation, there are a number of questions. When the Minister refers to withdrawal from the list, we would all like to know what the interaction is going to be. We understand removing someone because they are deceased or are outside the State and enough interaction has been had with them to ensure that that is definite. However, where further information is being looked for over the six-month period, we would like clarity about the interaction. Too many times as constituency TDs, we have seen families where there is an element of chaos, even dysfunction, and other things happening in life, meaning they have missed appointments and are then dropped off some of these services. We need to make sure that we are not allowing for something like that. I would request that. We need to know about the statutory guidelines and when we will see them, and ensure there is a consistent, streamlined approach. We all want to see that. The consistent approach would be the best approach. We have all spoken before about the entire process, from assessment to therapies, that we would like to see streamlined. I request that that information come as soon as possible. I know Deputy Quinlivan as Chair of the disability committee has requested a briefing and I believe it is to happen next Tuesday. It is vital that we have that level of information. I get fed up at this stage having a conversation about the size of the AON list. Particularly when dealing with constituents and families who are going through absolute anguish at times and do not necessarily have a child who is having difficulties in school but cannot get the very obvious therapies that he or she needs, all I want is for there to be somebody to talk to about this entire process. I heard Mr. Bernard Gloster say that before. This is being done alongside the idea of the autism intervention protocol and assessment service. I accept what the Minister says, in that there is no removal of the six-month right, because that is one of the few rights that people have and they do not want to let it go. There should be an assessment of need within six months. I do not think anyone would have an issue if someone who was deemed to need an autism assessment would have that, as long as we are talking about something that improves the service that they are going to get and that he or she actually gets the therapies that are required. Unfortunately, across all of this, we do not see anything about an increase in the number of occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, psychologists and physiotherapists, who are absolutely necessary. In-reach teams are to be filled at this point in time. When will we see that service up and running? I have always thought it would be incredibly difficult to see delivery on the numbers that are missing from primary care and children's disability network teams, CDNTs, while also trying to fill this third stratum to deal with the autism assessments. I would like to make sure that we have whatever detail is needed for this legislation. We will need further detail about what can be provided. In conversations like this, I often think of my own son, Toirleach, who is autistic. I think of the over and back that my wife would have had. He was in with the early intervention team, which later became the CDNT. He was in primary care, then back into the CDNT. I have said before that St. Joseph's National School and Ó Fiaich College have been his saviours. I will always believe in in-school therapies. I would like for us to have a more fundamental conversation about the Disability Act. We were talking to those occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists and psychologists about how to deliver a system and a service that worked. There are an awful lot of questions to answer, but at the minute, we are talking about breaking the law and failure to deliver.

For years, disabled children and their families have been failed by successive Governments. They have been promised rights, supports and services, but too often those promises have not been delivered. Families have been left waiting for assessments, therapies, school supports and basic services. They have been forced to fight the State for what should already be available to them as a matter of law and dignity. This is not a new failure. Governments have published strategies, made announcements and offered warm words, but families cannot raise their children on warm words. While Governments make announcements, children are waiting. While Ministers make promises, parents are fighting for assessments. While the State is legally required to provide an assessment of need within six months, the HSE said earlier this year that 21,782 children were overdue for an assessment, and there are more than that on the list itself. Behind every number is a child waiting for answers, a parent trying to understand what their child needs, and a family trying to access therapies and educational supports. These are not statistics. These are children and families who have been failed by the State. I have rightly highlighted this failure before, including the fact that the children in Limerick are waiting beyond the statutory timeline. The Government has been in daily breach of its own laws. This is the reality we are dealing with. Families cannot wait years for an assessment that the law says should be completed within six months. We all agree that the assessment of need process needs to reform, but reform must not mean reducing the right. It must mean making that right real, enforceable and deliverable. The Disability Act 2005, read together with the 2007 regulations, provides a framework in which an assessment must commence within three months and must be completed within a further three months, subject to limited exceptional circumstances. The six-month timeframe must be protected. If the Government tells us the proposed legislation does not remove the six-month statutory timeframe, which I think the Minister is saying, I welcome that commitment. We need an ironclad commitment and we need to have protection made absolutely clear in legislation. Six months must remain six months or sooner. We should be working to complete assessments within six months or sooner. The timeframe must not be an aspiration but an enforceable legal obligation. It must not be restarted because an assessment moves from one stage to another. It must not be extended indefinitely because the State has failed to provide the staff and expertise needed to deliver the service. The proposed legislation introduces a significant change in the structures of the assessment of needs process. The existing framework is intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of the nature and extent of a child's disability, the child's health and educational needs, the service required and the timeframe in which these services should ideally be provided. Under the proposed legislation, greater emphasis is placed on an initial determination of whether a person has a disability before the assessment process of his or her detailed health and educational needs. That is a significant change. We must streamline the process without narrowing the entitlement. We must make the system work better without making the rights smaller. That brings me to the role of the assessment officer. Under the proposed reforms, an assessment officer may determine whether a child has a disability before the full consideration of his or her health and educational needs proceeds. This is a significant responsibility to give to somebody, so we need to ask what qualifications, expertise, experience and skills the person must have before he or she can make the determination. The regulation requires appropriate qualifications, knowledge, competence and training, but the legislation does not clearly prescribe the professional qualifications and competencies required of an assessment officer. That needs to change. An assessment officer should be properly qualified, properly trained, experienced in disability matters, competent in applying the legislation and capable of a co-ordinated and genuinely multidisciplinary assessment. Assessment officers should not replace clinical, psychological, educational or therapeutic professionals. The role should be clearly defined in law to co-ordinate the process, gather and evaluate the relevant evidence, ensure the statutory requirements are met, and make decisions within the limits of their training, expertise, and legal authority. Where specialist evidence is required, the officer must have timely access to the appropriate professionals. This is particularly important when an officer is considering a "no disability" determination. That decision must be based on sufficient evidence, properly recorded reasons and appropriate professional support. The child and his or her parents must understand how the decision was reached and be clearly informed of the review and appeal rights. This is not about creating another bureaucratic hurdle. It is about getting the decisions right, and the concern is not theoretical. The HSE has warned that the proposed sequencing of the process could create delays in obtaining educational reports and completing the assessment of need within six months. That is a serious concern. If the new legislation requires a disability determination before the education component can proceed, the Government must ensure that this additional stage does not stop or reset the clock or delay access to the full assessment. The six-month period must run from the date when the valid application is received. It must not begin when the assessment moves from the disability determination stage to the health or educational needs stage. If the State has failed to meet its legal obligations, the answer cannot be to change the rules for the family who have already been waiting. We need both things at the same time: a properly qualified assessment officer and a genuinely multidisciplinary assessment process. We should not streamline the system by removing expertise from it. We should streamline it by ensuring the right expertise is there. For too long, disabled children and their families have been asked to wait for an assessment, therapy, school supports and the Government to act. Families have waited enough.

I could not agree more with an Teachta Quinlivan. Families are sick of waiting, and they have waited long enough. I will say to the Minister what I always say when we have a debate like this, that being, persons with disabilities are not disabled or restricted by their own bodies or intellectual capacity. Rather, they are disabled, or restricted, if you will, by an ableist world full of hostile architecture. They are restricted by systems designed to exclude them and they are gravely and seriously disabled by a Government that refuses to listen to them. It is very welcome that we have the chance to discuss the AON. However, this Bill will not provide for one single solitary speech and language therapist, occupational therapist or special education place more. Without those services, all the chat in this House is not going to make any difference to people's lived reality. I was looking back through my emails. A woman whom I have met contacted my office recently looking for assistance with an urgent issue affecting her youngest son and her family. She was at pains to point out that when these delays happened, it was catastrophic for the child. Of course it is. That has a knock-on impact on every single person in the family. Effectively, they all wait and they are all locked out. Her youngest child is now facing significant delays and barriers in accessing support at a critical stage of his development. In late 2024, this child was referred by the area medical officer to several services, including a neurodevelopmental clinic. The mother was asked to complete the assessment of need forms and return them to the doctor so that he could add the notes and submit the application. She did this. She delivered them in an addressed envelope to the reception at the doctor's office. Assuming the application had been submitted, the child's mam waited the statutory six months before contacting the assessment of need office to inquire on the progress. After several weeks of follow-up and being informed that the systems were down, the mam was eventually told that no record of his application could be found. She contacted the area medical office in May 2025. During that phone call, she was informed that there was no AON application on file. She was told not to submit another form because the doctor had no supporting notes, that no supporting notes would be provided and that the office would not support any request to backdate to 2024. She wrote to me to say that her youngest child's needs had continued to escalate significantly. He presents with severe impulsivity, a complete lack of safety awareness, physical aggression and significant behavioural challenges. Unfortunately, because his assessment of need form was never submitted, they are back at the beginning of the process. It fell to me to tell her that her son would now join a list that had 23,282 children on it. This is further compounded by the fact that she now has to start applying for schools, but she has no assessment of need. This mother has done everything right. She has given up work in order to be able to attend to the needs of her child because the State is not stepping in. Her child is being treated less favourably than other children, but his mam is doing her very best. Access to services that do not exist and being left lying on waiting lists and forgotten about are not good enough. I would not want it for one of my children. I do not think anybody would. It is not fair. In the coming weeks, we will hear the Minister's colleagues talking in the House about the budget and giving themselves a pat on the back for how well they are doing. The Minister should judge it by how long kids are waiting.

The most important issue here is the rights of children with disabilities. Any objective review of this Government and, in fact, previous Governments over a long number of years would show a poor record. In many areas, it would show a disgraceful record. In 2005, the Government at the time - the Minister's party was in government - put in place an Act that provided rights for children with disabilities, including the right to an assessment of need. Every year since, the Government has utterly failed. What we have seen is children waiting far too long for an assessment. In many cases, they are not getting it. Worse than that, however, is that parents have had to go to court daily to demand that the State implement what it is legally obliged to do. Hundreds of cases - thousands over the years - have happened. The Government then tried to pull a fast one. It brought in a new standard operating procedure. It tried to pawn off what was not an assessment of need as an assessment of need. Parents brought the Government to court. The High Court agreed with the parents that it was not an assessment of need. It was set aside. Since then, the waiting list has increased massively. In fact, it has multiplied by a factor of six, seven or more. We have far too many children waiting for an assessment. Children cannot get access to services. What is really appalling and upsetting for parents, who have to battle for services, is that the assessment does not come and they are told they do not need an assessment to access services, as if the services are there. They then try to access services, sign up with a CDNT, and are put on a waiting list for an assessment or a service to be given to their child. I raised last week in this House an issue in relation to the Waterford south city children's disability network team because I had met a group of parents. I have done far too many of these meetings, where, unfortunately, the same pattern or story is being told of parents stressed and unable to access the services and children not getting the developmental supports that they need. They were telling me that there was no point of contact for over a year for parents in relation to the CDNT. There was no nurse. Even trying to get incontinence pads for children who needed them was an impossibility. There was only one occupational therapist and no psychologist. As a result, children were left without supports. Children need multidisciplinary supports, including occupational therapy, speech and language, and psychology. It is all part of the team that is required, yet across many of these CDNTs, we do not have the staff. We can bring in legislation and tinker with the system, but the issue is capacity. The only thing that will resolve this issue for parents and children is if we have the staff and capacity to ensure, on the one hand, that children get timely access to an assessment and, on the other hand, they actually get the services they need. In the context of the Bill, there needs to be a discussion about the role of the assessment officers. I know this was dealt with during pre-legislative scrutiny at the relevant committee. It is something that needs to be teased out further on Committee Stage. I know a number of concerns have been raised. No impediment can be put in the way. There can be no three-card trick employed by the Government to in any way deny a child access to an assessment of need. It was enshrined in law. Children are legally entitled to this assessment. They are also entitled, I would argue as a matter of right, to appropriate services. For far too many children, they are not getting it. There are many missed opportunities for those children. If we are going to have a fresh start, that fresh start has to be about capacity and making sure that children have better access.

The central problem with this legislation is that it changes the assessment of need process without addressing the issue at play here, namely, the chronic under-resourcing of our services, compounded by the recruitment embargo in 2023, followed by the pay and numbers strategy, which was another form of recruitment restriction. We can change the eligibility for an assessment of need and we can change procedures or produce new guidelines, but if a child who does not proceed through the full statutory assessment of need process is then directed toward primary care, child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, or a CDNT that cannot see them for months or years, we have not solved the problem. We have simply moved that family into another form of purgatory. That is not simply my assessment. The report of the disability matters committee from the pre-legislative scrutiny process stated very clearly: "Across virtually every submission and hearing, the strongest operational theme was that delay and dysfunction in the AON system are inseparable from workforce service-capacity problems." That is the kernel of the issue. The Psychological Society of Ireland said that legislative reform alone could not resolve these delays without investment in staffing and retention across primary care, CAMHS and disability services. We heard the same critical message from professional bodies, disability organisations and service providers that the AON crisis cannot be separated from chronic workforce shortages and inadequate service capacity. They are different organisations with different professional perspectives, but they had essentially the same message, namely, you cannot legislate your way out of a capacity crisis. That is why our committee recommended that implementation of this legislation would have to be accompanied by a funded workforce and service-capacity plan, including multidisciplinary staffing, so that legislative reform is actually matched by operational capacity. Yet the Government is determined not to look at the elephant in the room. Where is that plan? By that plan I mean a credible, funded, multi-annual plan setting out the staffing that primary care, CDNTs and CAMHS actually require; what number of whole-time-equivalents are currently in post; where the shortfalls are; and when those posts will be filled. The Government repeatedly makes the point that a child does not need an assessment of need in order to access health services. Formally, that is the case as a child can be referred directly to those services but there is an enormous difference between having a pathway by which somebody can be referred to a service and actually being able to get assessed and receive an intervention from that service within a reasonable period. I have expended an extraordinary amount of effort over the past year trying to establish the true extent of waiting lists in primary care services for young people. Frankly, it should not have required the volume of parliamentary questions or hounding of the HSE that it did. I had to repeatedly ask not simply for broad waiting time categories of over 52 weeks, which is what the HSE kept giving me, but for the longest actual waits, and the numbers of people waiting more than two years, three years, four years, etc., because broad national figures can completely obscure the experience of the children at the far end of these waiting lists. What eventually emerged was jaw-dropping. In July of last year, a child on a primary care psychology list had been waiting 13.5 years. In June of this year, almost a year on, the longest wait for psychology was still over ten years. Also, this year, a child waiting for an occupational therapy assessment had been waiting 509 weeks - almost ten years. The longest physiotherapy assessment wait was 346 weeks - more than six and a half years. These are for very short blocks of intervention. This is not wrap-around supports over the long term. Given that primary care is supposed to provide early intervention, these waits would be farcical if they were not so consequential for the young people left waiting. Therefore, when we say to families, "You do not need an assessment of need to access services," we need to ask a much more important question: when will their child actually get the service? That is one of the reasons families pursue an assessment of need in the first place. For many, it is not simply because they have some particular attachment to a statutory assessment process; it is about pursuing the only part of a fragmented system where there is a clearly defined legal entitlement. That reality came through repeatedly during our committee meetings and it is against that background that we have to look at what this Bill is changing. The legislation makes clear that an assessment officer will first determine whether the applicant meets the statutory definition of disability. Where the determination is that they do not, they do not proceed to the subsequent part of the process assessing the health and education needs arising from a disability. That is a hugely consequential decision and my particular concern is about the child on the other side of a "no disability" determination. That child may still have very significant needs. Where do they go? Who has clinical responsibility for working with the family? How quickly are they going to be seen? Who makes sure that they have not simply disappeared from the statutory AON process into another queue that could last years? Our committee specifically recommended that the Government publish data not simply on AON waiting times but on no-disability outcomes, closure decisions, reviews and the impact of implementation. We need to know what happens to these children afterwards. There is then the very significant question of who makes that initial disability determination. Some assessment officers have clinical backgrounds and considerable relevant experience but the Bill does not require an assessment officer to have relevant clinical qualifications or clinical experience before making this determination. This issue was examined in detail by our committee. Department officials told us that the assessment officer role is currently an administrative role, that the work at this stage is typically desk-based and that assessment officers are not operating in a clinical capacity, yet they are making clinical decisions. A survey of 22 assessment officers found that 59% had a clinical background. That also means that a substantial minority do not. This was not just an Opposition concern. A Fine Gael Deputy, Micheál Carrigy, questioned how somebody without a clinical background could make such a significant early determination before a clinical assessment had taken place. His Fine Gael colleague Deputy Keira Keogh rightly asked the very basic question of whether there would actually be eyes on the child before a decision was made not to proceed further. This is why the committee recommended minimum qualification, competence and experience requirements for assessment officers, including relevant clinical qualifications. It said that where an assessment officer is making a determination that someone does not meet the statutory threshold for disability, that should either be underpinned by relevant clinical qualifications or be subject to review or sign-off by an appropriately qualified clinician. That is a sensible safeguard. Why is it not provided for in the Bill? The Government may say that clinical advice will be available and point to the development of in-reach teams but access to clinical advice is not the same thing as a requirement for clinical oversight of a decision which can stop a child proceeding through the statutory assessment process. We need to bear in mind that these assessment officers will be under enormous political pressure in an overstretched system to reduce referrals for assessment of need. I also want to address the single point of access initiative. I fully support the principle behind it. Families should not need to understand the internal architecture of the HSE before their child can get help. They should not be passed between primary care, CDNTs and CAMHS, with one service saying the child belongs somewhere else and the next service sending them back again. A genuine no-wrong-door approach would be a significant improvement. However, the single point of access does not resolve the underlying problem which is the failure to adequately staff services. A more efficient referral pathway into a ten-year waiting list is still effectively referring a child into a phantom service. I am hearing varying reports from around the country about how single point of access is functioning in practice. There is also a serious unresolved issue around contested cases. What happens where primary care believes a child requires CAMHS? What happens where CAMHS believes that child is more appropriately supported through a CDNT? Who adjudicates that? From what I am hearing among clinicians around the country, psychiatry is not fully signed up to how these contested cases will be resolved. This is not some peripheral concern of mine. The final report of the Committee on Disability Matters specifically identifies "the absence of a clear and timely HSE mechanism for adjudicating on contested referrals or service-boundary disputes". It says disputes over whether primary care, CDNTs or CAMHS should take responsibility can leave children and families without a clear service response. This has to be resolved because a single point of access is only a meaningful reform if there is also a clear point of responsibility. These safeguards are particularly important when we are making changes to the point at which somebody can be stopped from proceeding further through the statutory process. The deeper point remains: the assessment of need crisis cannot be separated from the crisis in the services surrounding it. If primary care were properly staffed, if CDNTs had the multidisciplinary teams they require, if CAMHS and CAMHS-ID had sufficient capacity and if single point of access genuinely meant that children could no longer fall between services, then families would have far less reason to pursue an assessment of need simply to get their child assessed. If those services remain severely underinvested in, changing the statutory process risks changing where children wait rather than ending the waiting. Therefore, I want the Minister to address four fundamental questions to bear in mind as we proceed with this Bill. Where is the funded workforce and service capacity plan recommended by the committee, particularly for primary care? Why has the committee's recommendation on clinical qualifications, experience or clinical sign-off for assessment officers not been provided for? What is the final national mechanism for adjudicating contested single point of access cases and are all of the relevant clinical disciplines fully signed up to it? What happens to the child who receives a no-disability determination? Who follows that child through the system and establishes whether they actually receive the assessment and intervention they need? The measure of these reforms cannot simply be whether the AON waiting list becomes shorter. We need to know what happens to these children. Were they assessed? Did they receive therapy? Did they receive the right service? Most importantly, did they get that help while it could still make the greatest difference to their development and well-being?

I welcome the effort to streamline things for children with disabilities but I have a number of concerns. It starts from when a child is born. In my own constituency of Dublin South-Central there is a lack of public health nurses so developmental checks that take place at zero to six months, six to 12 months, one to two years and three to five years and so on are not happening in my constituency. There is not enough staffing. The challenge parents have is that they might get their zero to six month check when the child is six months. They are often given a tick-box checklist: "These are the things you should look out for." Early intervention and identification of developmental delays at that age are essential and are connected to assessments of need, AONs, because if we are not able to get an assessment of need, if a child is on a waiting list for an average of 27 months, how will they know what that is? I know this legislation is an effort to streamline things. Even when a child does get an assessment of need, where are the services? The reality is that so many children do not get the services. As education spokesperson for my party, my huge concern is the fact that the assessment of need is no longer needed for provision in a special class or a special school place. How will the school know what the child's needs are without suitable documentation? There are concerns among education unions that they were not consulted when this announcement was made earlier in the year. How exactly will this work in practice? Deputy Quaide has spent so many months and years looking into this and identifying where the challenges are. From an education perspective, we see even today, in this House, that we have two special schools in respect of which the parents are begging us to facilitate what is needed in those schools even more. We are constantly playing catch-up for children with disabilities and adults with disabilities. I am so concerned that this system is so confusing, is so hard to navigate and is understaffed. My other concern is that those children who did not get a public health nurse visit or an assessment of need on time - now they do not need one - are not getting this service in the CDNT or primary care and not getting an appropriate school place. What does that say to a child? They were failed by the health system and then they will be failed by the education system. We are failing them. I have massive concerns that this is a way of just getting rid of those over 20,000 children who are waiting over six months and the €23 million the State has spent to defend that delay.

I welcome the opportunity to comment on today's Bill. I have three key points to deal with: first, fragmentation of services; then the suitability of the people making assessments; and, finally, the root causes of these issues. First, accessing services is fragmented, difficult and plagued with delays. This Bill and this Government, instead of ensuring that children are not waiting ten years for primary care psychology or speech and language therapy, are simply moving the goalposts and creating a new system which fails to guarantee children and their families the supports they need. Pressure on the assessment of need system does not justify gatekeeping access. While it may massage the numbers, the reality is that it will leave thousands of children uncounted and unsupported. These are not just my words and my views, and I thank the parents who told me and my office about their experiences. A mother of three children with additional needs told my colleague: Children will not be appropriately identified, and it places teachers and parents in a very difficult situation. Is this just Government trying to cover over the extent to which they continue to fail our children? We need to treat children with disabilities equally, as full people. They may have educational needs, health needs and social needs just like the rest of us. Our systems should move to recognise the whole person, not further silo off support and leave parents going from pillar to post, from waiting list to waiting list, all while struggling to give their children the best support they can. My second point is that this system means that people who are not qualified to assess children are put in a position of deciding what level of support they need. This Bill does not require the assessment officers to have relevant clinical qualifications or experience, so the gatekeeper of the proposed system does not necessarily need to have any clinical expertise. Another parent in my constituency shared her experience with me, and it shows just what we risk when we do not have properly qualified people conducting assessments: My daughter was just diagnosed Autistic last year while trying to transition to secondary school and dealing with puberty. At all parent teacher meetings at primary level we asked how she was socially as I had always had a feeling she faced additional challenges. We were mostly reassured that she was fine, even though she had very few friends. This is not to blame the school. The primary school is amazing but they just don't know what they don't know. My final point is that we need to address the root causes of waiting lists and service delays, not treat the symptoms by trying to lessen the number of people who can access the system. Our disability services are plagued by underinvestment, huge workloads and a poor or non-existent referral system. These are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. These are real children and real families and they deserve real support, not moving goalposts.

There is extreme concern, as my colleagues have expressed, that really what is going on here is the Government trying to hide the scale of need that it is not meeting and that this is not ultimately about delivering services but about trying to take the political pressure off. It is disgraceful when we look at the waiting lists. Of course, that is the power of the waiting lists. They reveal the level of need that is there. The waiting lists that were released as a result of the great work by my colleague, Deputy Quaide, show that, for example, 3,500 children between zero and four years of age are waiting for psychology. These children are at the most important stage of their development. There are 1,000 children waiting over a year. That is the figure only for those between zero and four years of age. Of those, 464 are in my constituency. Another area is speech and language therapy. These are children awaiting initial therapy. Let us say you get the assessment or you are passed on. How long do you wait for the actual therapy? There are 6,500 children across this country waiting for initial therapy. There are 680 waiting more than two years, and two thirds of those are in my constituency and the Dublin north area. These waiting lists are absolutely unacceptable. There is an inequality as well in all this because we know from talking to parents that many of them are forced to pay privately to try to access the various services. What that means for those on lower incomes is that they are pushed. We saw the research from Barnardos showing that two out of every ten families literally cannot put food on the table. Part of the reason is that families are squeezed to try to pay for services the State should provide. The Government says that it is about cherishing all children equally and that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are about giving every child the same opportunity, while these children whose families cannot afford to pay to access services do not have the same opportunity. They are stuck on waiting lists for basic services that should give them equal chances in life but they are not getting them. We have a deeply unequal society. The Government talks about all the gains it is making and all the changes it makes, but these children whose families cannot afford to go private and who are stuck on waiting lists are being developmentally delayed and being denied basic opportunities and supports. The minimum we should have is a public primary care system that meets every child's needs regardless of the ability of the family to pay for them.

This is a very important Bill. As the Minister is aware, disability services in Kerry face huge challenges, including staffing shortages, long waiting lists for children's assessments, respite for children and a lack of adult residential and respite care. There is a huge backlog in relation to assessments of need and huge issues with services, accessing services and staffing. As the Minister is aware, the HSE and Kerry Parents and Friends Association have struggled with recruitment, which has severely impacted all services, including residential and respite care for both adults and children in our county. There are massive issues and gaping gaps for children with profound disabilities when they reach 18 years of age and transition out of child services. Parents and their families are on their knees. They are at the end of their tether and genuinely face burn-out when it comes to services, respite and residential shortages right across the county. At this stage I would say they are burnt out from fighting on behalf of their loved ones and lobbying us politicians for what should be a basic human right. We are coming from a very low ebb when it comes to disability services. We are still in the dark ages. I have met many of the families in County Kerry and their loved ones. I have met many of their mothers. What these wonderful families have been put through is absolutely heartbreaking. They are providing the State with a massive service with little or no help. They are caring for their loved ones on a 24 hour per day basis, seven days per week, all year round. They have no choice but to carry out their duties, more often than not without a wink of sleep. Many of these families in our county have not received a night's respite in seven or eight months. Many have had to forego important family events because they cannot get respite. If anyone believes this is acceptable, they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. This is appalling. It is an absolute disgrace, and it has to be changed. It is at crisis point and has been for many years. We consistently hear about the huge budget for disability services. There is no real evidence of this on the ground so far. The families who are directly involved do not see it and those at the coalface do not see it. There is an urgent need for a cost-of-disability payment. Individuals and families are facing savage financial pressures from trying to deal with their disability, especially now with energy costs like gas, oil and electricity at an all-time high. The Government must introduce a cost-of-disability payment in the budget in two weeks’ time. The Minister is aware of the Before We Die campaign. Parents are extremely concerned about what will become of their loved ones when they themselves pass away. This is a real concern and a real issue. I received a reply to a parliamentary question recently which stated there were 500 qualified housing applicants and a mere 12 properties available. As the Minister is aware, I have raised the issue of St. Mary of the Angels in Beaufort, which is a fabulous residential facility and campus, along with St. Francis Special School. I am aware that Crowe consultancy group is looking into the future of St. Mary of the Angels. There is massive potential for this campus. Outside of the buildings there is a school, a special swimming pool and lovely gardens. There are approximately 15 acres of prime development land. It is an ideal location in the heart of our county, in mid-Kerry, with many services already being provided. It is the ideal location for a centre of excellence for people with a disability, for day services, day respite, night-time respite and residential care. It will be a missed opportunity if we do not grab this once in a lifetime opportunity to do something big and great that will serve the most vulnerable in society for decades to come, especially in our own county. I plead with the Minister to do everything in her power to give hope to the many families in our county who have been deprived of services they deserve for far too long. It would be sinful if the opportunity were missed. I was obviously delighted to invite an Taoiseach to St. Mary of the Angels recently to meet with the staff, and the staff in St. Francis Special School, to see for himself this fabulous campus and the opportunities that are there.

I share the Minister's ambition that this should be the best country in the world in which to be a child. That should apply to every child and they should be able to access whatever services are needed as quickly as possible. I disagree with some of the arguments being put forward about a Government effort to massage figures. If we look at the figures, which are widely available, the scale of need has grown. When the current model for assessment of need applications first opened in 2008, there were 2,535 applications. There were 13,186 last year. We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of applications. It is important to acknowledge, particularly in work done by the Department of further and higher education, the increase in the number of places on medicine and allied related courses. In 2025, there was a total of 320 additional places in occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and dietetics, and an extra 141 places on third level courses in those areas starting in the 2026-27 year. The Minister has been open and honest in acknowledging the scale of the challenge. I also welcome Government moves in providing additional higher education course places in these specific areas. That said, like all of my colleagues, I am concerned about how long it is taking to access services. There should be no wrong door. There should be a possibility that a child in need of an assessment has it done as quickly as possible and that they can have access to the necessary services. I was concerned when I found out at the end of last year that for County Wexford there were 261 assessments of need overdue for completion, based on the Department's own figures. In other words, those application assessments had not been completed within six months. There were 261 in Wexford, but in County Wicklow it was 1,194. Those statistics are individuals. They are families, as Deputy Cahill talked about. It is all-embracing, not just for the individual young child or young person concerned, but for their whole family. It is something that is of deep concern. We need to develop and provide certainty to all of the CDNT teams around the country and ensure they have access to a psychologist, a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist and the necessary admin support to do their work. That is not the case around the country and many of the CDNT teams are not working in ideal conditions. In that regard, I instance the one in my home town of Gorey, where there has been a continued problem because where the CDNT is operating at present is not up to scratch for a modern clinical team. The intention was to move it to the new Gorey primary care centre whenever it was built. However, the HSE has taken 16 years before it made any decision with regard to that primary care centre. I am appealing to the Minister. Part of the problem with some of the decisions being made is that many areas of Government are not talking to each other. People working in the CDNT are not necessarily engaging as fully as they should with the HSE. There is often a similar challenge with regard to CAMHS. Many of these organisations are operating in silos. I also touch on an issue I have raised before about CORU and the recognition of overseas qualifications. It is completely bizarre that people are able to acquire good qualifications in medicine and medical-related areas, including speech and language and occupational therapy, but CORU delays their recognition for month after month. We have vacancies that need to be filled. If people want to come into this country to work in those specific areas, we need to fast-track recognition of their qualifications. It should not be a case that a regulatory agency is holding up the recognition of those qualifications. It is absolutely essential that we place far more emphasis on school-based therapy services to provide as many supports as possible within schools in all of our communities. When Anne Rabbitte was Minister of State with responsibility for disability, there had been a difficulty with a special school in County Wexford about the appointment of a speech and language therapist and occupational therapist. They had been back and forth with the HSE. In fairness to the then Minister of State, she told the special school to go ahead and hire them and she would make sure the HSE paid them the money. There needs to be far more partnership with some schools to ensure that what we have is a child-centred approach in the delivery of all of these services. I know the Minister is deeply committed on a personal level to reform this and to ensure that assessments of need happen as quickly as possible. However, it is not just about the assessment, but that the necessary support services are put in place. I believe we need to address the costs through some form of cost-of-disability payment in the budget, as has been outlined. I come back to my central point. We want this to be the best country in the world in which to be a child. There should be no wrong door for any child or their family when it comes to seeking the supports they need. I support the moves being made in this legislation, but it is how it will be implemented and the impact it will have that will make a real difference.

The test of any disability Bill is very simple. Will it deliver better outcomes for children with disabilities and their families? Those families have heard enough about reforms, reviews and new processes. What they need has been stated many times. They need assessments and they need services. What I want to know is if this legislation will improve the scandalous situation affecting children with disabilities and their families in Monaghan and Cavan. There are 794 children in my constituency waiting for assessments of need. Virtually none of them will receive it within the statutory six-month period. Each one of that number is a child. Each one represents a family that has been fighting a system that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have allowed to fail them. The Government response is to introduce a new Bill at a time when it is breaking the law that is already in place. I want to say this clearly: the families of these kids will not accept any attempt to simply streamline children off a waiting list rather than deliver their rights. Changing procedure does not provide a single extra speech and language therapist. It does not provide a single additional occupational therapist, psychologist or special education place. Families in counties like Monaghan and Cavan do not need another Government announcement. They do not need a new law. They need the law that is there to be honoured. They need the staff to be employed to do the work. Above all, they need their children to get the services that they are entitled to when they need them.

Most parents who have children with additional educational needs are very well aware of the context of this legislation. The reality is the Government needs to change the process and the legislation because it cannot abide by its own laws. It is breaking the laws it has set. That is a scandalous situation. There are other issues we could say this about as well, but it is remarkable that there is so little improvement in an issue that has got so much attention and discussion in so many years. In fact, in many respects, things have gotten worse. As things stand, there are almost 2,000 children in the county of Cork who have gone beyond the statutory timeline. About 80% of them are more than three months over the statutory deadline. Even for those in Cork who have an assessment of need, of the 370 reports completed since 2022, only a fraction have service statements to outline what supports and services will follow. Ultimately, the next failing after that is the fact that children who have all the correct documentation, reports and so on are unable to access the services and therapies in an adequate way and on time. That is another issue. That brings me to access to therapy in special schools. I attended a briefing a short time ago that was also attended by parents of children who attend Carrigaline Community Special School and a special school in Belmayne. Some of the stories told were simply unacceptable. There is a particular issue with ETB schools and the fact that there are not enough therapists attached to the multidisciplinary team. There are also issues with respite. They also raised a lot of other good points about the standardisation of policies and procedures across special schools and training in special education for teachers. Children in Carrigaline Community Special School, in other ETB schools and in all kinds of schools across the State are being failed because there are not adequate therapies available. I know that this has already crossed the Minister's desk. I urge her to ensure that in schools such as this – it is not about any one patron, it is about schools as a whole – get the therapies they need for the children that attend them.

I welcome the Minister. I also welcome the intent she has displayed in bringing this Bill forward to make changes to the process relating to assessments of need. While I agree that legislative reform is necessary, I am of the view that the proposed changes presented in this Bill do not address the key issues of resourcing and funding. The needs of children should be met by the State through the provision of well-resourced public health and education services. We all know that early intervention is vital but, shamefully, far too many young children are failed by an under-resourced and overstretched system for assessment and in the context of the provision of essential supports and therapies once diagnosis is secured. At the end of last year the Government promised targeted reforms to the assessment of need, with the Minister for Education and Youth stating that the system is no longer fit for purpose. This Bill is not the targeted reform parents and their children need. This Bill is short-termist, with piecemeal changes that will have absolutely no real or tangible impact on children and their families. Every day of the week I try to support families who are being failed by the Government because they cannot get access to the essential therapies they need and deserve. Some 90% of children are not seen within the six-month limit, as required under the Disability Act. The average waiting times have now stretched to more than two years. We have a system that is unable to cope with the demand and it is shortly going to implode. Only this week, I have been supporting multiple families who cannot get an assessment of need or access to vital therapies. I will give an example from one constituent in Kildare South. It states: We applied for the Assessment of Need in May 2023, we were advised that an assessment would be completed no later than November 2023, as per the legal requirements. However, this did not happen and I went through the complaints procedure, and received further notification that an assessment would be completed no later than September 2024. The person involved stated that another two years have passed since the previous deadline and that it has been almost three years since the initial application, which is far too long when it concerns the well-being of her daughter. Another family of a young child I am working with in Newbridge has been waiting over a year and, equally as important, that child is still without a special school place. That is the harsh reality for many families I am working with throughout Kildare South, as are many of my colleagues in the Labour Party. I have had families tell me that they are forking thousands of euro on services that should be and must be delivered by the State. They are eating into savings and college funds and taking out loans and going to credit unions just to get access for their children to the services they need. The Minister previously announced the 11 new in-reach teams to provide clinical guidance and support for clinicians performing assessments. The Government can barely staff the CDNT teams throughout the country. Only recently I received a reply from the HSE west and central Kildare area that they are still recruiting for an assessment officer. The most recent figures available to me also show that, as of October 2025, there was an 18% vacancy rate across positions in CDNTs, with over 450 positions unfilled. Vacancies include those key and vital therapies, with 27% of occupational therapies and 44% of clinical psychologists unfilled. Will the Minister provide an update to the House today on the actions her Department is taking to address the workforce challenges we are all seeing right across the State in every area. As well as that, the reply to the parliamentary question also informed me that they are relying on private providers to increase the capacity of assessments and decrease waiting times. I believe every resource of the State should be used to tackle these issues. However, could the Minister clarify how much the State is paying to private providers at this time? This is an issue across the health sector whereby the State is outsourcing healthcare, and where the Government is not doing enough to prevent long waiting lists and vacancies. Under the current Act, the statutory timeline for an assessment of need is six months. In the HSE Dublin and Midlands area, there were more than 6,500 children overdue completed assessment of need reports. Nationally, the figure is over 20,000. Figures from the HSE also show that 8,200 children were waiting for their first contact from the CDNT at the end of March 2026. More than 5,260 are waiting over 12 months. The regional healthcare area of HSE Dublin and Midlands, which includes my county of Kildare, has the highest waiting list for first contact with a CDNT, and nearly 1,700 children have been waiting for over a year. We in the Labour Party have raised concerns regarding continued attempts by Departments to pass the buck. When the Minister previously announced the replacement of the existing assessment of need process with a new system, we in the Labour Party raised concerns as the proposals were to replace the requirement of a formal diagnosis when determining access to a special class and special school. This, as my colleague, Deputy Eoghan Kenny, stated, is a serious development. Such proposals will have profound implications for school teachers and, most importantly, for the children and families who urgently require timely access to specialist support. By replacing diagnostic criteria with an educational assessment, the Government is placing an unreasonable and unsafe burden on school communities. The Minister has said that children will no longer need an assessment of need to get a school place and that it will be up to education to allocate places. I presume that reference was to the Department of education. Unfortunately this is not happening for those who require a special school place, as I found out recently in my constituency of Kildare South. For so many parents right now, an assessment of need is one of the criteria for the allocation of a special school place. Some of the families I am dealing with are waiting on an updated assessment of need as the one they have for their child is a number of years old. The problem they have is that their child is now older, the disabilities and medical conditions remain the same or, unfortunately, have increased but they are waiting on an updated assessment of need or an interim report to try to secure a special school place for their loved one. Time is, unfortunately, against them. I am sure the Minister is aware of statements made by the INTO calling this a profound breach of trust, a sentiment we in the Labour Party continue to echo. The Taoiseach even said that assessment teams would be carrying out such work. I ask the Minister to clarify which assessment teams will actually end up doing this work. This situation is leaving parents with two parallel pathways, with one to get the therapies the child needs and another to get a diagnosis and a school place for the child. The Government's solution is to place more pressure on teachers who are already, as we all know, stretched to their limit. They cannot be expected to pick up the slack from Departments and they cannot take the responsibility for the failure in addressing the huge waiting times. It is a system not based on lived reality. Only recently my Labour Party colleague, Councillor Ali Field, brought a petition to the European Parliament to fight the case of her family and other families regarding the long waits for an assessment of need. At that time she said: My son James who has severe autism and is totally nonverbal has been failed by our state on so many levels. James was deprived of essential early intervention help while he was left waiting on a list for almost two years for an Assessment of Needs and diagnosis. I have been banging this drum for many years now, as have so many parents and advocates. But our government are not listening. They do not seem to realise that they have a duty of care to all children including the children with the highest support needs. Another mother who signed the petition, Vivienne Sullivan from Kildare, said: My son Isaac was on the AON list from 2017 to 2025. His file was lost twice, and on another occasion, he was recorded as having been seen when he had not. We rang weekly and, in the end, daily. Often the phone was unanswered. He finally had an assessment in March 2025, but he still has no access to services. Isaac is 14 now and has been waiting since he was 5. It's not acceptable. Following this petition I am pleased to see the European Parliament Committee on Petitions has sought a report from the Department on the Government's continued breach of children's rights. I hope that today the Minister will acknowledge this and provide an update to the House on the publication of the report. In the Labour Party's alternative budget of 2026 we set out how we would urgently invest in tackling what has happened with the Government and how it has added to the growing waiting lists. The Labour Party would have an initial additional allocation of €15 million under the waiting list initiative to outsource assessments of need for the 5,000 children waiting longest while capacity is built up in the public service. We also need to see urgent action to train more therapists and specialists along with ring-fenced funding to hire future staff. There is also a real question regarding the Government's proposals as to how these new assessment teams will be staffed. Access to an assessment of need has become a major barrier for many families of children with additional needs throughout Ireland. There is an element of short-termism in the Bill as it does nothing to address the long waiting times for assessments of need and does not support timely access to services needed by so many of our children. I also want to raise concerns about the fact that the Bill will give powers to issue statutory guidelines when the Dáil has not seen sight of those guidelines. As have others, I ask the Minister to confirm the proposed guidelines. What is the timeline for these publications? Has the Minister seen these guidelines? These are critical questions that must be addressed by the Minister and the Department before the House can give any consideration to, or have confidence in, the changes we have been presented with here today. What parents and their children actually need from the Government is a clear and immediate action plan that gets to grips with the growing waiting lists. The workforce challenges in vital services like speech and language, occupational therapy and physiotherapy must all be properly resourced. Children must have access to special schools and school places in their local community. Families need certainty from the Government that their child can access an assessment of need and the services they so desperately need so the constant battle can eventually stop. The Government must give a clear commitment to families on when it will finally comply with its own legal obligation to the assessment of need process under the Disability Act 2025. I will share another story before I finish, and take young Padraig Creaney from my home town of Athy as an example of the issues and problems I deal with on a daily basis. Padraig got an assessment of need when he was 12 years of age but despite his family continuing to seek a new assessment to cover his additional and, unfortunately, growing needs, it has not been forthcoming for more than 12 years. The family simply does not know where to go next. As it is for the Creaney family in Athy, every day is a fight for these families and their children. They are fighting for basic services. There is a fight for an assessment, a fight for therapies and a fight for a school place. When will the Government finally support these families and actually make a real dent in the waiting times and lists for access to an assessment of need and the vital therapies that the children of this State deserve and have a right to?

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate on the Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026. For me, disability advocacy is not only a policy area but really personal because for 19 years prior to becoming a TD I worked in the disability sector. I specialised in supporting mainly neurodiverse children at an early intervention level alongside their families and their schools. I know this area really well. I worked in private practice as a choice because my counterparts and colleagues in the HSE tended to have huge caseloads that yielded a lot of stress and overwhelm. I was able to keep my caseload at a manageable low level and see clients and families on a weekly basis, which often yielded very good results and achievements. I know first-hand the struggles that families with disabilities or suspected diagnoses face. Over many years I referred many families to get an assessment of need, mainly to access home tuition at the crucial and very influential early intervention ages, with regard to ten hours of tuition between the ages of two-and-a-half years and three years and 20 hours between three years of age and preschool. As a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters I have had the opportunity to hear detailed evidence from stakeholders, service providers, advocacy groups, parents and, most importantly, people with disabilities themselves for whom we cannot and should not make decisions without their input. In my previous role, my role as a member of the committee and my role as a Mayo TD, one message has come through clearly again and again and it is one that we all know. It is that the current assessment of need system is under huge strain and needs reform. This is something we all agree on. The committee on disability matters has heard repeated evidence of long waiting lists, significant demand, staffing pressures and the frustration and upset experienced by families trying to navigate a system that is really complex and difficult to access in a timely manner. As we know, data from 2025 showed that 87% of children in Ireland did not receive their assessment of need within the legally required six-month timeframe. This statistic is deeply concerning because behind every one of these figures is not just a number; a delayed assessment is a child or a family waiting for answers and crying out for support or information. These are real children and families who need to access supports to meet their needs. I know, and it will be said again and again, that people can access primary care without a diagnosis and can access a CDNT without a diagnosis but because there is pressure on these services some people turn to an assessment of need thinking it is a faster pathway to services. Others will definitely still want an assessment of need to understand their diagnoses. As I said, there is then that cohort that wants the diagnosis because, as matters stand, they need it for home tuition or access to an autism class or a special class. I understand from parents that the frustration rarely stems from the assessment itself but, rather, from the delays experienced. Many families, including those living in rural parts of County Mayo, face long delays for specialist appointments and that can delay access to crucial early intervention that would yield some of the most significant developments in the early years of a child's life. Families really want to have a system that is fair, transparent, responsive and focused on identifying the supports their child needs as quickly as possible. On that basis, there are positive aspects to this Bill. A key aim of the Bill is getting the therapists back doing more therapy rather than spending more of their time carrying out assessments. As this new system is introduced, we must ensure that there are always eyes on the child. That is one of my concerns. I want to ensure that at all points there are eyes on the child and that the assessment officer has the necessary expertise to make the crucial decisions. Where a child is found not to meet the disability threshold, that decision should be issued in writing and with clear reasons provided to the family. The parents must also have access to a review and appeals mechanism, because these decisions do have life-changing consequences and families need all possible transparency and fairness and to have confidence in the process. One of the most important changes is the emphasis on a needs-based approach. We all agree that the assessment of needs process should be focused on identifying and understanding a child's needs rather than being consumed by unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative difficulty. In my view, a needs-based approach has the potential to allow professionals to focus their expertise where it matters most: on developing appropriate plans and supporting children to access therapies and services sooner. For families in County Mayo and throughout rural and urban Ireland, outcomes matter. Parents want their child's needs identified early and accurately in order that appropriate health and educational supports can be put in place. It is in this vein that I also welcome the provisions regarding the development of the national statutory guidelines. Families should have confidence that the process is being applied fairly regardless of where they live in the country. I also welcome the provisions in the Bill relating to the withdrawal, closure and reinstatement of applications. It may be the case that this is a practical response to a reality that many families experience, as individual circumstances can change and families might experience illnesses or a need to move, and under the current legislation there is no clear mechanism to facilitate those situations, which can leave applications inactive within the system for extended periods. I am nearly out of time, so I will cut to the end and welcome the legislation. I hope it streamlines the process and clears the backlogs, but I do want to make sure that there are eyes on the child as well during the making of these crucial decisions.

I welcome the debate on this Bill. Parents who have contacted me about assessments of need consistently raise three points, namely timely appointments, clear answers and a straightforward path that supports their child’s development. We know the current system is not delivering that. In 2008, the HSE received 2,535 applications. Last year, that figure grew to 13,186. By the end of June of this year, 23,282 were overdue. In the first quarter of this year, only one in ten was completed on time. Behind each figure, of course, is a child waiting and a family losing time they cannot get back. This Bill makes three practical changes. It focuses the assessment on what a child needs rather than on a lengthy diagnostic report, which is in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD. It puts statutory guidelines in place so that a family in my constituency of Dún Laoghaire, or a family in Donegal and elsewhere, can expect the same process. It allows applications to be closed where a family has withdrawn or moved abroad, with a right to reinstate within 12 months. What the Bill does not change matters just as much. The six-month statutory timeline stays, the right to apply stays and the definition of disability stays. I ask the Minister for one assurance regarding Committee Stage. The Joint Committee on Disability Matters raised concerns about the qualifications of the assessment officers who will decide in the first instance whether a child has a disability. Families need confidence in that decision. I would welcome the Minister setting out how it will be provided. Equally, an assessment records a need. It does not meet it. The 11 new in-reach teams, the therapists now in our special schools and continued recruitment are what will turn this Bill into real help. This Bill deals with the start of the journey. I want to use my remaining time to comment on the other end of it. In recent weeks, I have heard from parents in my constituency who are part of the Before We Die campaign. I thank them for making their views known. They are asking for progress, and they are right to ask for it. Their question is one that no parent should have to carry into old age: who will care for their son or daughter when they are gone? The evidence supports them. The latest figures from the Health Research Board, HRB, show more than 2,100 adults using disability services whose main carer is aged 70 or over, and 516 whose carer is over 80. They show that 2,197 people needed residential places, with nearly three in four needing one now. I welcome the acknowledgment by the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, on Monday that too many families reach crisis point before a residential place is available. I know the Government has begun to respond. The Taoiseach met the campaign and put the issue on the agenda of the Cabinet committee on disability. This year’s disability budget is a record €3.8 billion and will be used to fund 152 new residential placements. This week, the Government confirmed that every council will set targets for housing people with disabilities from 2027 to 2030. I will work with my colleagues Councillors Moylan and Clark to make sure that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s target matches that need. I recognise the providers who carry out this work every day. In Dún Laoghaire, there are many providers, but I focus on one, namely the team at St. John of God Services, which has provided generations of people with outstanding support from Dunmore House. Carmona Services supports 750 children and adults with intellectual disabilities, from early years through to day services, respite, residential homes and independent living. Its staff, and the families who fundraise alongside them, are a credit to the community. Even with services of that quality, Carmona has to tell families that they have to wait for a residential place for too long, and that matters to them. The problem is not the people doing the work. It is the number of places available, and we need to see more progress here. I have two specific requests to make of the Minister. First, that the successor to the action plan for disability services, due from 2027, guarantee a funded future plan for every adult whose main carer is over 70, agreed with the family before a crisis and not after it. Second, that the Department establish the national register of need these parents have called for, so that every family knows where it stands and the State can plan ahead. Every family deserves timely assessments and a clear path to services that work for them right through the person’s life. I look forward to working with the Minister and her officials as she continues to make progress on these issues.

Parents being left waiting for assessments of need for their children is a huge issue in my area. To me, what the Government is trying to do here today is typical smoke and mirrors. It is going back to its usual three-card trick by moving children from list to list without them getting the proper therapies that they need at the end of it. I represent the same constituency as the Minister of State with special responsibility for disability, Deputy Emer Higgins. We both represent children who are a waiting list for assessments of need. In our area, as we speak today, over 2,000 children have been waiting for more than six months for an assessment of need. The Government is breaking the law by not providing these assessments under the Disability Act 2005. Last year, instead of providing resources for therapies, the Government spent €7.2 million fighting these desperate parents in court. These are parents who just want their children to reach their full potential. There is no greater crime than this. In our area of Palmerstown, 154 children are waiting for an appointment with a physiotherapist. Will the Minister guess how many of these children have been waiting for more than a year for appointments? The answer is that every one of them. This Bill that we are speaking about today does not provide for one additional physiotherapist. In the children's disability network team, CDNT, in Rossecourt, which serves Adamstown, Lucan and Balgaddy, we have only 43% of the number of psychologists that we need in our area. The Clondalkin CDNT is housed in a lovely, brand-new building. There is no point in having a brand-new building if we do not have the staff to provide therapies there. We have no occupational therapist and no speech and language therapist, and this Bill does not make provision for those posts. I cannot see anything in it that will help the parents who contact me desperately trying to get the therapies their children need in a timely manner. The Government really needs to buck up its ideas and get this sorted.

It is unbelievable that we have to come in here every year to talk about the issues with services for children with additional needs and children awaiting an assessment of need. The average waiting time in Cork at the moment is 27 months, notwithstanding the legal requirement that all children should receive their assessments of need within six months. I spoke to a woman yesterday who had received a letter stating that her child would be waiting 36 months for assessment, which is six times longer than the legally permitted time. Government members come into this Chamber trying to cod the people. They are trying to cod the parents who have to fight every day for their children with additional needs or disabilities. The Minister needs to do her job and address this issue. I have a list in my hand of children with additional needs, special needs and disabilities who are not in school right now because they have no school transport. I spoke to a grandparent yesterday who was driving his grandson to school from Blarney Street in Cork city to Fermoy three days a week. School starts at 9 a.m. and this grandfather waits three hours in Fermoy before collecting the boy at noon and driving him home. How can anyone be expected to do that every day? That child misses two days of school a week. I know of other children who are at home because there is no school transport. Where are the extra resources? Where are the occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and SNAs people need? Where are the school places and the school transport? Children are being sent from Ballincollig out to Boherbue and Macroom. Children from Knocknaheeny and Mayfield are being sent down to Rochestown. Children from the northside of Cork city are being sent to Fermoy, which is a 40-minute drive. Why are places and services not being provided in communities for the children who need them? It is not right.

This Bill sums up everything that is wrong with the Government's approach to disability services in this country. We have a crisis, with families crying out for help, and here we have a Bill that is not about investing in the health and education professionals needed to operate a properly functioning system. The Bill is not about addressing that in Chamber House CDNT, where well over 1,000 files simply have not been opened, there is a vacancy rate of more than 50% in some professions and a rate of one third across the board. In Tymon CDNT, also in my constituency, the situation is similar. This Bill is not about providing resources. Instead, it is about looking for shortcuts. Rather than putting the resources in place to meet the goals, it is about shifting the goalposts. The Government has been under massive pressure on this issue. That is a testament to all the campaigners, parents and families who fought for years to put it on the agenda. Cara Darmody has been outside Leinster House again and again. The campaigners have demanded action on assessment of need and provision of the therapies that must flow from that. The Government is feeling the pressure. At the end of June, 23,000 assessments of need were overdue, with assessment taking an average of two years and two months to complete. That has created a problem for the Government. One of the good things in the law is that assessment of need must take place within six months. That is clear. When people come to me looking for support for their children, the first question I ask is whether they have applied for an assessment of need and, if so, how long they have been waiting. If it is more than six months, the advice we give them is obvious and, I presume, is the same as that given by lots of other TDs. We tell them they should ask a solicitor to assist them to take the State to court. Obviously, it is ridiculous that people must do that. Of course, once the assessment of need is done, children just move onto other waiting lists for necessary therapies. Unfortunately, there is no legal right in terms of timeframes for access to therapy. The Government has a problem with the law that requires an assessment of need to happen within six months. Instead of the State's approach being to provide the resources to ensure people get an assessment of need within the timeframe and that the State stops breaking its own law, what we are seeing, in effect, are attempts to water down the law to reduce the legal liability on the State. In reality, we should be expanding that liability by introducing timeframes in respect of therapies as well as for assessments of need. Instead, the Government would like to water down its liability. The pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill by the committee reported that any reforms to the AON process should not restrict access for children and families and should provide clear and robust procedural safeguards. Witnesses warned that if the legislation resulted in a higher threshold for determining disability before a fuller assessment of need can be carried out, children with complex, fluctuating or less visible needs could be screened out of having those needs assessed at all. It seems none of those concerns has been heeded in the Bill. What we are getting is a new system that will enable the HSE to unilaterally withdraw assessment of need applications without seeking parents' consent. The conditions under which the HSE can do this are not specified in the Bill. Instead, section 5 provides that this will be worked out in ministerial regulations. That means we will not get a chance to debate, amend or vote on them in the Dáil. It is fundamentally undemocratic. We are expected to take the Minister's word for it that the conditions for withdrawing parents' applications will be fair and reasonable and that the HSE's desire to cut waiting lists will not be a factor. We have seen this previously with other waiting lists, such as for social housing, with people arbitrarily bumped off the list because the State claimed their needs had been met through the housing assistance payment, HAP, or there was no response to a letter. The power of the HSE to withdraw applications and bump applicants off waiting lists is all the more worrying because there is no requirement first to get parents' consent. The withdrawal is to happen instantly once the HSE decides to issue a withdrawal notice. The parents can challenge it and request a reinstatement but the application will only be reinstated from the date of that request and will not include the time between the notice being issued and the reinstatement request. That could encourage further massaging of waiting lists. What happens if the parents do not get the withdrawal notice because they have moved house? What happens if they have been made homeless? Many parents are going to be in that situation. They will get 12 months to request reinstatement but with the process currently taking two years and two months, lots of parents will not realise they have been taken off the list. What the Government is trying to do with this Bill is extremely concerning. It should invest in providing assessments and services rather than trying to fiddle the figures like this.

Bringing this Bill before us is an admission by the Government that it has failed, and is failing, tens of thousands of the most vulnerable children in our society. Introducing the Bill, the Minister indicated she was mindful of that failure by referring to the unacceptable waiting lists for assessment of need. She talked about the frustration felt by parents and families and the impact on children. However, the Bill she has put forward does absolutely nothing to address that. She did not even bother to explain what the purpose of the Bill was and how it would impact on the problem she briefly and half-heartedly acknowledged, namely, the unacceptable failure by the State to provide the most vulnerable in our society with the necessary assessment of need. Some 28,000 vulnerable children with special needs and disabilities have not received an assessment. When people finally do get an assessment after a long wait, they cannot access the services they need. The Government's Bill looks designed to cull the lists. It certainly will not deal with the fundamental problem, which is that the CDNTs are massively understaffed. The Government has failed to recruit the people necessary to staff the CDNTs to be able to do the assessments, and more important, to provide the services, supports and resources children need, which are critical and which their parents are up the wall about because they know they will have a lifelong impact on their children. The failure to get a diagnosis can compound situations in terms of mental health problems the children suffer from, getting bounced between CDNTs and CAMHS. The change in definition from disability to substantial restriction is very concerning. What does that mean? What defines "substantial"? Why does a change in definition address the problem? It is difficult not to suspect that what is happening is that the Government is reducing eligibility, that it is raising the bar to make it more difficult for people to get the services and supports they need, rather than addressing the fundamental problem. It has the right to take people off the list because when people are waiting this long, many people are forced to go private. Where have we seen that story? We have seen it in every public service situation. Long waiting lists force people to go private, leaving the poorest, the least well-off, on the lists and they can be taken off if they do not reply to letters. People who are the most vulnerable and most stressed with housing situations - and often housing crisis situations overlap with children with these sorts of needs - might not reply to letters. They get taken off a list. They realise they have been taken off the list and seek reinstatement but are put at the bottom of the list again. It is unbelievable and it looks, unless the Government can tell us otherwise, like this about culling the list and reducing eligibility for the things that are necessary. Section 6 gives power to the Minister for statutory guidelines. We do not know what they are. We already have assessment of need guidelines. Why does the Minister need this new power? We are being asked to pass legislation, when we already have guidelines, that gives the Minister the power to pass new guidelines, which we have not been told about and we do not know what they are. It stinks and it certainly will not address the problem. It looks like culling the list.

The current situation regarding assessments of need cannot be allowed to continue. It is a national scandal. Children with special needs who are vulnerable cannot even get assessed to get proper services. Some 23,000 assessments of need are overdue, having exceeded the statutory timeline. The average duration it takes to get an assessment of need is 27 months. That is the average. Some people wait up to three years. That is not acceptable. In Laois-Offaly, the figure averages in the region of 900 overdue assessments of need. Laois-Offaly in particular continues to be a blackspot but there are several blackspots in the country. Key to this is the staffing of the HSE. There are not enough clinicians to do the assessments. Getting the assessment is only the first battle in the difficulties for families in Laois-Offaly. The fact is that the CDNTs, in Laois in particular, do not have the required number of staff to provide the therapies and services. That is the real problem. The most recent HSE staffing figures I have are that in network 11, which covers the north of the county, no dedicated occupational therapists have been assigned to date, there are no psychologists and no social workers have been approved. That is network 11. I will move on to network 12 which covers the other two thirds of Laois. Three OT posts and two speech and language posts are vacant and no social workers have been allocated. They are the HSE figures, not mine. People therefore finish up having to pay for assessments of need privately. Many cannot afford to. It works out at between €1,000 and €2,000. Then they have to start paying for occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology and so on. This is putting huge strain on the majority of middle and low-income households. Organisations, such as Laois Offaly Families for Autism, provide support including counselling services and therapies, but they are made up of volunteers. Are we going to load all this on volunteers? These are typically mothers and fathers who have children with special needs and have to raise money to try to provide the services. The legislation brought forward by the Minister could help to speed up the AON process, if it is done correctly, but staffing is the key. Without the staff, the legislation will mean nothing. They are the facts. I am seriously concerned about the power being given to the Minister and the HSE in section 5 to remove applications. It presents a real danger and the Government has not explained this properly. There is real concern about this and it is deemed an opt-out clause. Statutory guidelines are promised as part of the Bill. If they were proper guidelines they would be required but it has already been pointed out that there are guidelines in place. There needs to be consistency with standard procedures and transparency. The assessment of need has to be about establishing what the child's needs are. Early intervention at a crucial stage of a child's development is simply not happening. This is the sad thing about all this in many cases. We know the importance of having timely interventions at the point children are at in their development. What is the update on the 150 additional staff that were promised for CDNTs? In her closing remarks, the Minister of State might give us those figures. They are just to replace the people we are losing from the CDNTs. We need to accelerate that. Will there be enough assessors? I note that 11 clinician guidance teams are promised in the Bill but will be there be enough assessors in place to carry out the assessments of need? That is a key issue that needs to be dealt with. The Government needs to make it a national priority to fill the gaps in the CDNTs properly. In Laois-Offaly and a lot of other counties, but Laois-Offaly is a particular blackspot, that means filling the wide gaps in occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology, social work and other therapies. Anything else is simply window dressing. That is the fundamental point. Resources are needed. Streamline it but do not streamline it in such a way to get people off waiting lists who need to be on them, children who need to be seen, looked after properly and assessed and given the services they require.

Before I speaking on this Bill today, I got the views of a solicitor who takes many cases on behalf of parents. This is their initial perception. This Bill amounts to a significant watering down of the rights of children with a disability. The assessment report under the 2005 Act has been described by the courts as the gold standard. It is supposed to be comprehensive and evidence based and set out the child's needs and the services required to meet these needs if costs were not an issue at all. Under the 2005 Act, an assessment report had to include a statement of the nature and extent of the disability. This was hugely important to families as the report set out the extent of the child's need. Now, all that will be provided is "a statement of the substantial restriction to which the applicant is subject". The Minister of State will agree that is a huge difference. We need to break the news to families, disability organisations and advocates that they need to get agitated about this. In recent years, one of the biggest features of society has been the activism of disabled people and their carers. There was the Green Paper that had to be withdrawn by the previous Government. The care referendum was rejected because of issues around disability rights and there have been campaigns all around the country for school places appropriate to children's needs, by parents, mainly mothers. It seems that the assessments of need rule really bothers the Government because it gives parents the right to have it done within six months. We all know that 90% of these assessments are not done within six months, leaving the Government looking really terrible. In introducing this, the Government is now trying to create a new avenue that would get rid of that terrible vista. These assessment reports will be much less comprehensive and less thorough. They are clearly designed to reduce the waiting lists but what will they actually deliver? As has been said, there are huge concerns about people not being classified as disabled in the first place under this legislation. The six-month rule definitely galls and pains the Government. Some 9,300 children currently await a first appointment with a CDNT. The number has fallen but it is still very high. In Dublin 15, which makes up most of the Dublin West constituency, a task force on special education had to be set up. One of the findings of that task force was that 40% of referrals to the CDNT were still just that - referrals. I heard another TD talk about the waiting list in Cork. I do not mean to make comparisons or to have a poverty competition but in one of the CDNTs in Dublin 15, as of last year, the waiting list was up to seven years long. It is one of the highest by far because of the youthful population. The other one was better. How is this going to be addressed? The crux of this is that the Government is not able to recruit the professionals who are needed. The reason it cannot do so is that they have fled to the private sector. That is where most of the people are. What is ironic is that they are actually doing these assessments of need privately and parents are paying for them. They have also fled the country because they cannot afford to live here because of the chronic housing crisis that this Government and previous governments have not dealt with. They cannot afford to have a decent life here. Until that is addressed, the CDNT lists are just going to keep on increasing. I have a million pages of notes here that I wanted to bring in but I will just say that this is an attack on children's rights. Who are these assessment officers? I do not have time to develop that point but perhaps the Minister of State would answer that question because it is not stated in the legislation who the people who are going to do these assessments are.

I broadly welcome the Bill. It is not a very long Bill but it is important insofar as it sets out important minimum standards. One thing on which we can all agree is that we must make this process easier for the people who need assistance. We must make it easier for people to get the assessments and to get help in place so that they can then reap the benefits of that assistance. We know that there are people the length and breadth of this country who need assistance and who, in reality, are not getting it or not getting it in sufficient quantities or in a timely manner. We can all get behind the idea that the purpose of this Bill has to be to make it easier for people who have additional needs and who need the support of the State. I might start by making a point about the drafting. This is something I say about all amending legislation like this Bill. The 2005 Act is the principal Act, the Act that is being amended, but it is impossible to know what this Bill, which will be an Act, does without having a copy of the 2005 Act next to you. Because sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 amend provisions of the 2005 Act, it is impossible to know what they are actually changing unless you have the 2005 Act present. This is a point I make quite a lot. When we are amending legislation, we should consolidate that legislation. Instead of amending specific provisions within a section, we should repeal that section and restate it in the amending Bill because that would make it much more accessible for everyone. This is part of what I am talking about, the need for it to be more easily accessible. You should not need to have two pieces of legislation to understand what one of them does. In general, we should be moving towards simply restating the law, making it available in one place rather than in two. That is a technical issue more than anything else. With regard to what this Bill does, the specific and targeted amendments I have mentioned relate to certain aspects of the existing assessment of need process and aim to make the system more effective and efficient. However, I do not believe that legislation alone is actually going to do that. It may well be a tool that is required to achieve it but what the people who need disability assistance and various services want to know is whether this legislation will actually change the landscape for them in real terms. Are they actually going to be able to access the services they need in a timely and efficient manner? The review of the 2005 Act, which is being led by the Department of children, is obviously welcome. The notion of nationwide statutory guidelines to standardise how the HSE carries out assessments and consistency across geographic regions of the country are very important. However, we already have targets that have never really been achieved, including the six-month deadline which has been breached time and time again. Perhaps the Minister of State will have an opportunity to address this in what she has to say but, however necessary this legislation might be, it is not clear to me how it guarantees in any real way that those targets will be reached. That is a question I am asked all the time by people in Dún Laoghaire. They want to know how we are actually going to change this system so that it works for the people who need those services. Even though the statutory six-month deadline for assessments of need exists in law, every one of us in this Chamber has spoken to constituents. I do not want to say that deadline has been disregarded because I do not think there is anybody out there who is not trying to meet it but we have not managed to deliver on it. We have to be able to deliver if anybody is to have confidence that we are reforming this system in a way that will actually make a difference. The approach of this legislation has to be about making it easier and more accessible for families. We must ensure the staff are in place to operate this system. If there are vacancies, that needs to be addressed. Most of us will have heard stories of gaps that are there and situations that have not been filled. That creates delays and knock-on effects for families and people with disabilities. That has to be addressed. I sometimes despair at the slow pace of progress. Again, I do not think anybody is deliberately frustrating progress but, as legislators, it is our job not only to put in place measures requiring progress but also to put in place mechanisms to support delivery. I support the provision of the 11 new inreach teams, which will be available to provide clinical guidance and support for clinicians performing assessments of need and the assessments informed by the new autism access assessment protocol. I note that each team will include a psychologist, a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist and an administrator. That is welcome because that is the kind of thing you can point to when dealing with constituents. It allows you to say that concrete things are being done to ease the process and to grease the wheels in a way that will actually have a tangible effect on the ground. I welcome the fact that these teams are being put in place. The Bill is quite short containing not very many amendments. I hope the Minister of State will be able to give us a commitment that the effect of the realisation of these amendments on the ground will be to create greater, more efficient and faster access for people with additional needs, people with disabilities, their families and their parents so that they can get what they need and to deliver for those people. That is what everyone in here wants. That is what we are all waiting for.

What every parent wants to know is whether this legislation will deal with the issues and the specific timelines that will be put in place. Will it make the assessment better? Based on this legislation, I cannot tell them. I am happy to support any legislation that will in any way deal with the waiting times for families and the other issues they face in relation to assessments and access to therapists, including occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and physiotherapists but I do not see that in this Bill. Let us not pretend that this Bill is going to fix everything as regards the care of those who need it. It is not. If it is not going to, we have to ask where are the professionals we need to deliver the services, to carry out the assessments and to put in place all of the supports individuals require. There are many other players out there in the delivery of services who are doing it to the best of their ability but whom the Department is not looking at to see if it could learn from them. I will give the example of SOS Kilkenny. The principal individual there is Francis Coughlan. He has put forward his budgets year in and year out. He has been left short. He is trying to innovate and move the services on within the community. He is trying to support the families. It is an excellent organisation. Every single year, however, he, the families he represents and the individuals for whom he provides the services are being challenged by the State in terms of the delivery of the services that they need. It is the State that is letting them down because it is not planning for the professionals to be employed and to be maintained in their jobs. What they need is the pay that will keep them there and the structure that will allow them to work freely within the HSE or any other organisation. They are not getting that. That is, perhaps, why they are leaving the country and going elsewhere. I can point the Minister of State to St. Patrick's special school, which is again delivering services way beyond what it should be doing and way beyond what it is being paid for doing. It is not being acknowledged. I encourage the Minister of State to visit the likes of those services and to go Jonah Special School in Slieverue and see what they are trying to do with limited resources, and very successfully doing it, but they require the State to intervene to support them and give them money to develop a modern state-of-the-art service housed in buildings that can accommodate the needs of those children. We are not learning from those at the coalface who are doing this for individual children. Kingsriver Community in my constituency is another project that is doing fantastic work. It is being treated very badly by the HSE. There is no planning in terms of the financing of capital programmes or the financing of the services that they are delivering. The staff are giving more and more of their time - they are not being paid for it - just to make sure their services are being delivered to the clients they have. How bad is that in terms of the reflection on the State? It is absolutely scandalous. The CDNTs, CAMHS and all those organisations that children get referred to are under enormous pressure. As a result of that, children and families are being pushed from pillar to post. They are not getting the type of assessment that is required or the supports that are needed in a structure that is heavily bureaucratic and is interested in nothing other than fulfilling a timeframe or a limited scope in terms of the treatment of all these cases. Neither do I see a plan in place to look after children as they go through their teenage years and become young adults and to support the families in question. What is going to happen when parents die and move on? What is going to happen to those children? What plan is in place to look after them? Where are the services that are defined that they will need? They are not there. As I worked with the Down's syndrome organisation in Kilkenny, I have seen where they too cannot get services from the HSE. When they get their funding, however, which the Minister of State kindly assisted them with, they are able to buy the services privately. It is the bureaucratic nature or set-up the HSE that causes people to look beyond that service. They can deliver a more streamlined service without the hindrance of the reporting mechanisms that are all there. We should not try to hide the fact that we are failing children and forcing them and their families into the courts. We should not be doing that. Every single cent of funding should go directly to organisations that are successfully delivering the type of therapies and support services that are needed, not just for the individual concerned but for the family also. I have heard these debates over and over again and there are no results. I am deeply disappointed with the system and that there is not more in this Bill.

There are many issues with this Bill. What I wish to focus on is if it is successful in its content as assessment of need is often only the first step in a long and arduous journey towards seeing these needs met. As Teachtaí McGuinness and Ward stated, this Bill will not provide a single additional speech and language or occupational therapist. It will not provide additional special education places in our schools. It will not address the failures in workforce planning that allow vacancies to persist for far too long. In response to a recent parliamentary question, the Minister highlighted to me the supposed progress made nationally in delivering these reports. However, in my constituency of Cavan-Monaghan, there is no such supposed boom in care for our children. In fact, in half a year just 18 assessment of need reports were completed. This was nearly one third less than in 2024. There were 18 assessments out of 800 applicants. How can the Minister of State stand over this? We are nowhere near addressing this for the people of Cavan and Monaghan. Just one report was completed within the statutory timeframe. There were zero in the previous year. This is an abject failure and an utterly shameful and contemptible failure on the part of the Minister of State and her predecessors. My challenge to the Minister of State is that as the Government looks to progress this Bill through the Houses over the coming weeks or months, she should see how many assessments of need she can oversee the completion of in Cavan and Monaghan in that period. Can the Government deliver one single report within that timeline that it is legally obliged to meet?

When we strip away all of the legislative jargon and the Government's spin surrounding this Bill, one question remains: is it going to get additional services for the children who need it? That is not just a concern that has been expressed on these benches. Even some of the Government's own representatives have questioned whether this is going to happen. The answer, unfortunately, is "No". The Bill is being presented as a solution to the assessments of need crisis, but the same Government that has presided over the collapse of the assessments of need system is now introducing the legislation that appears designed just to make the waiting lists look smaller on paper. At the end of June, there were 23,000 children waiting beyond the statutory timeframe for an assessment of need and 20,000 waiting more than three months beyond the legal deadline. Those are children whose development is being delayed. Families are living in uncertainty. Parents are forced to fight the State for years to get the services that they are entitled to receive. The crisis cannot be resolved through administrative changes like the Government is seeking to do. It requires investment and leadership and that is what the Government has failed to provide. Year after year, governments arrive with a Bill that seeks to streamline the process, but who are they streamlining it for? There is no assurance that families will find themselves removed from waiting lists through bureaucratic processes that they do not fully understand. There is no confidence that children who are taken off lists will be quickly reinstated when circumstances prevent attendance at appointments. Parents have every reason to be worried because this Bill does not address the real crisis. There is not one additional speech and language therapist. There is not one additional occupational therapist. There is not one additional psychologist and no additional special education place. There is no guarantee that any child who receives an assessment of need will actually receive the therapies they deserve.

I welcome aspects of the Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026. The Minister of State can argue that it is absolutely required, but in another way it is just a reflection of ongoing State failure. For over 20 years, it could be argued that the State has breached its own laws under the Disability Act 2005, which has left so many thousands of vulnerable children without access to services. In this context, we could call any sort of move towards a needs-based approach a positive step because a child should not need a complex medical label just to get their basic speech and language therapy sessions. Giving the HSE the power to get rid of the defunct applications from the list will give a more accurate picture of the backlog and will reduce the backlog to a degree but the backlog will still be massive. This Bill does not address the actual historical lack of services. The law stipulates that an assessment must take place within six months and yet the reality on the ground, as others have mentioned, is different. Groups are saying different things but the statistics indicate a wait of about 24 to 27 months and in some cases three to five years in individual worst cases. As others have said, it has been estimated that roughly 21,000 children are overdue assessments in the country. I acknowledge that the State has spent a lot of money on services but the State has also spent about €23 million on legal fees fighting parents in courts and that money could have been put into the front-line services. Groups like Inclusion Ireland and AsIAm have repeatedly pointed out that the change in the rules does not mean anything when we still have a 30% vacancy rate across the children's disability network teams. Those teams need to be filled. Deputy Seán Crowe raised an issue in this Chamber relating to one particular area in Tallaght in CHO 7. The constituency I share with the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, including areas like Saggart, Rathcoole, Lucan, Palmerstown and Clondalkin, has one of the worst bottlenecks in the State. I believe it was Chamber House that Deputy Crowe referenced which had a 53% staff vacancy rate, which means a lot of families were left absolutely stranded. Thousands of families have been told that a child is a so-called "open case" but they have never received a first contact from a therapist. The definition changes here will not create those speech and language therapists. We want to see real investment in staff. I know sometimes in other areas of the health and family support services it has been difficult to actually get to that. I acknowledge there is a challenge. This legislation will not get any educational psychologists or other psychologists for families in Newcastle or Rathcoole. Others might argue that this Bill is purely a cynical exercise in legal risk management, a way to stop parents from suing the State by lowering the bar in terms of what constitutes an assessment. I do not believe that but the Government will be open to accusations unless it backs up some of the measures in this legislation with increased staffing levels so that we can see the number of people on the waiting list coming down.

Independent Ireland will support measures that generally speed up assessments for children with disabilities. However, let us be very clear that speeding up paperwork is not the same as speeding up care. I have repeatedly raised the waiting times for assessment of need. Families are waiting far beyond what is acceptable. Parents are exhausted, fighting the system while vital years in their children's development are passing by. These are not statistics; these are families. I know of a five-year-old child referred for an assessment of need on 29 May 2026. The family was later told that the child was being placed on a waiting list for a private provider and that this could take another seven months. Families are being told about timelines, stages and processes. What they want is an assessment and the help that their child needs. Another young man from Bandon was referred for an assessment of need when he was four years old. He is now 12 and still waiting. His family moved address within the same area and informed the HSE but his assessment was never followed up. How can we possibly defend that? Another 11-year-old boy waited 18 months to be seen by the west Cork children's disability network. He was then told he did not meet the criteria and was referred to the primary care for speech and language therapy, and psychology. After waiting 18 months he was simply moved from one waiting list to another. That is not a joined-up disability service. This problem does not end with children. A 47-year-old woman with an intellectual disability has been waiting for two years for a place with CoAction Skibbereen. She is at home for 24 hours a day with her elderly father without the stimulation and socialising she needs. She has been assessed as suitable for the service but still has no place. She should not be facing another winter sitting at home simply because the services are not available. We also deal every year with parents desperately trying to find special class places for children with autism. Children reach school-going to age without their families knowing whether their child will have an appropriate school place. The same uncertainty happens year after year. That is unacceptable. The same applies with SNAs. Principals across Cork South-West tell me they need greater SNA support. The system must recognise the needs that exist in the classroom. There were also serious problems with this year's summer programme with late planning, portal problems and delayed approvals. Schools need adequate notice so that they can recruit to teachers and SNAs, and properly plan for vulnerable children. One principal in Cork South-West told me about a child who had received additional staffing and had successfully attended the summer programme for the previous two years. This year, the additional staffing was refused. The principal faced a choice of telling the child he could no longer attend or somehow make the programme work. She refused to turn the child away and instead she gave up her own paid role and worked without remuneration so that another staff member would be paid and the programme could operate safely. No principal should have to work for nothing to plug a hole created by the State. Early intervention is supposed to be the cornerstone of our disability services but early intervention is meaningless if a child spends years waiting for an assessment and then joins another queue for speech and language therapy, occupational therapy or psychology. I agree that we should speed up assessments but above all we need to put the staff and services behind those assessments. I have been involved in many of the meetings that have taken place over the past 12 months or so. The problem for children with intellectual disabilities is that they have no voice. If their parents are not strong enough to be the voice for them, they are left out in the cold. I know of a child in Castletownbere who cannot get transport services. That child is currently at home sitting with her dog every day of the week. That is no place for that girl to be. She is an intelligent child. She needs to be respected but she cannot because there are no services. There are no transport services. The whole system is broken from start to the finish. There are 85-, 90- and 95-year-old parents trying to drive children for intellectual disabilities services which sometimes are not there. Even if they are there, the elderly parents are no longer able to do it. They are not getting the help that is needed. A very serious issue that needs to be looked at is the transport service for people with intellectual disabilities. The Before We Die campaign is trying to fight to give their children a right to have a home. Many of them can live independently as we have proved in a project we did in Schull, where there are two children with intellectual disability.

We can pass whatever legislation we like in this Dáil but first we need to have the people to carry out the assessments to support the legislation we are putting through. We are able to bring in all this different legislation but we are not able to follow through on it, which is disappointing. We have the housing crisis. Students are qualifying in different fields within medicine and then have to leave the country because they see no future here. It is down to supply and demand. We have fantastic skilled workers here in various different fields. I spoke to a woman last week who had completed her qualifications and was going into the health service. She has done four years and was about to do a further year in the area she wanted to cover. She looked at it on the basis of how much it was going to cost her even though she was trying to further her education to help people. She decided she had enough and was going to head off. I met her parents who were devastated that she had to leave the country. This is a young person aged 24, not long out of college and she wanted to further her education. She said to me that she had no future in Ireland. She said, "I want to stay near my family. I want to work within disability. I have no future. My only future is to leave this country." We have inflation issues, over taxation of people who are working and over taxation of fuel for cars which are necessary for people to go to work. Every young person who wants to stay here is given no option but to leave. Who is going to suffer only the people on the waiting lists and the people from disability sectors who need help? That, to me, it is a failure for the Government not to see it has to make sure everyone in this country who wants to stay here is given the right to do so and can see a future and raise a family here, if they so wish. Looking at the statistics, the age of couples who want to settle down to have a family, compared to one decade back, has changed and gone forward ten years. I know people who are settling down at 35, 36 or 37. I was married at 26. That is the difference today. Even those couples who do not want to get married are not settling down until closer to their forties and possibly having only one child. When we go forward two or three decades from now, we will be looking for people to look after us, but they will not be there. What are we doing? We are driving them out of this country because we are not putting in the proper supports for them so they can care for others. That is the sad thing about this. We can make legislation, but it is only a piece of paper. It is no good unless you can actually put the proper infrastructure behind it to make sure it happens. The infrastructure in this case is to give all the young people qualifying in this country the opportunity to stay here. We have to keep them here. This has to come through not just in the disability or health sectors but also in the housing sector and ensure there is viability so that they can see a future. If you cannot achieve that, you will not achieve anything. We are going to have to work together. I ask the Government to listen to reason. The budget is coming up. It could do one thing in this budget to help everyone in this country and give them a small piece to ensure they have some bit of money left in their pockets at the end of the week. I have said already and will say again that there is only one piece Government has got to do that will have a knock-on effect across everything, and that is a cap on the taxation of fuel in this country. Fuel can keep rising but increasing the fuel cost and increasing the taxes on people we want to keep here will drive them out of the country all the time. On the other side of that, you have people protesting. People in this country cannot afford to protest and do not want to protest. They are not going out and jumping up and down just for the sake of it; they see no other option. They are not criminals and they should not be put down as that. They are people who see no other option and they are standing up for people from the disability sector, the vulnerable and children. They stand up for all those sectors. The Government has a chance in this budget to give a small lifeline to people to make sure we can hold them in this country.

This Bill is a three-card trick. It is dressed up as an effort to help people with disabilities and special needs but it is little more than a press statement in the form of legislation. It costs very little to produce and draft a Bill, but there is a cost to providing services and to providing the professionals needed to be able to deliver those services. The assessment of need system is under enormous strain. More than 20,000 assessments are overdue and more than 90% of children are not receiving an assessment of need within the statutory six-month timeframe. Applications for assessments of need have risen from approximately 4,700 in 2020 to 13,000 last year. Those figures represent thousands of children and families waiting for answers and supports. The parents who want to spend their energy on helping and raising their children are actually spending all of it on trying to get the services they are entitled to and to negotiate the system that is preventing them from getting the help they need. We heard before at the committee on disability that organisations accept the need for reform. They accept that the current system is not working well enough. However, they also raise serious questions about this Bill and the fact it does not address the root causes of this problem. One concern that has been raised repeatedly is that the problem is not simply the assessment process itself but, rather, capacity. Organisations repeatedly pointed to shortages of psychologists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and other professionals across the disability sector. They described a system which demanded continuous growth in resources but is not being provided for. During that committee, it was noted that a disability team which originally supported about 121 children with eight staff members was later supporting 628 children with only an additional six staff members. The result was that waiting lists went back years rather than weeks. I want to reference the work of Cara Darmody, who has been hailed, and rightly so, in this Dáil as a young girl who has probably done more on the whole issue of assessments of need than any TD here. TDs are so fast to get their photographs taken with her but they are not listening to her and that is the key issue. One of her recent proposals was that to fill the gap of professionals and staff needed, it would be logical to try to contract in those resources privately to deliver that work. She made that request to the Tánaiste at least six months ago and made it again recently. I am a great believer in public services but you also need common sense and cop-on. If there are private staff available here or in Britain, they should be used to bring down the current waiting lists. The evidence points overwhelmingly to a shortage of staff and this Bill will not change that. It changes procedures but it does not change capacity. It does not increase the staffing levels or create an additional entitlement to supports once an assessment has been completed. This is a significant limitation - a life-changing limitation, in reality. I am also concerned by the introduction of a preliminary determination of disability before full assessments of need take place. Many people simply see this as a trick by the Government to reduce the waiting lists in the future. Assessments of need should be focused primarily on understanding the child's needs and identifying appropriate supports. Care must be taken to ensure additional procedural steps do not create further obstacles for families already navigating complex systems. Careful scrutiny is required regarding the provisions that allow applications to be deemed withdrawn and closed. There will also need to be a process is needed to deal with circumstances where a case can no longer progress. Legislation must also recognise practical circumstances such as communication failures, changes in contact details and family circumstances and simple administrative errors. Strong safeguards are essential. Another issue that must not be overlooked is what happens after an assessment has been completed. The Disability Act provides a right to an assessment but it does not provide a corresponding right to receive the supports identified during that assessment. For families, that distinction is critical. Receiving confirmation of a need is important but having that need met is what truly matters. The Bill also gives considerable weight to future guidelines. Greater consistency across the country is a worthwhile objective, but people with disabilities, families and representative organisations should have a meaningful role in shaping the guidelines that will ultimately influence how assessments are conducted and how eligibility is interpreted. Ultimately, legislation must be judged by outcomes. If waiting lists remain at current levels, children continue to wait for years for assessment and supports remain unavailable after needs have been identified, families will see little practical benefits from procedural reform alone. Reform is necessary, consistency is necessary and clarity is necessary but, most of all, capacity is necessary. Until those reforms are matched by investment in staff, services and supports, we risk changing the process without changing the experience of the child and the families who depend upon it.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. Supporting people with disabilities and their families is a priority, particularly for me as a TD for Galway East, to ensure the people of Galway East receive the services they deserve. I want to see a system that supports their needs close to home and gives families confidence for the future. I start by acknowledging the work Government has been doing. It provided €20 million this year for the assessment of need targeted wait list initiative, the development of therapy services in special schools and the work to recruit additional clinicians. All of this is to be welcomed and encouraged. It is a case of building on that. With those measures, we have to be honest about where we are. As of the end of June, more than 23,000 assessment applications were overdue. Behind every one of those applications is a person waiting and a family trying to understand what help is available and when it will arrive. For a parents watching their child struggle, being told the system is under pressure offers very little reassurance. They know that early intervention matters. They need to see that urgency reflected by the system. This Bill proposes practical changes to make the assessment process more consistent and more focused on a child's needs. I support that direction. Where an appropriate assessment can establish the support a child requires, we should avoid unnecessary duplication that takes clinicians away from providing therapy. I also welcome the retention of the statutory right to apply for an assessment and the existing six-month statutory timeframe. Those protections matter and families must have confidence that reform will strengthen the system. The provisions for closing and reinstating applications must be handled sensitively. A family overwhelmed by caring responsibilities may struggle to respond to correspondence and they need to be given the time to address and deal with it. They must receive clear communication and meaningful support before an application is deemed withdrawn. We must also remember that completing an assessment does not in itself provide a child with therapy. Families need access to speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and the other supports identified. Children who need help must be directed towards appropriate services even when they do not meet the statutory definition of a disability. Our responsibility continues into adulthood. People need suitable day services, respite and residential supports with genuine choices about how and where they live. Families need confidence that those supports will be there as the circumstances of the family change. I was over the moon last year when I saw that the ring-fenced disability capital budget was going up by €15 million to a total of €43 million. I ask the Minister of State to go back to her Department and get absolute clarity about how that money has been spent this year to date. What capital projects have been delivered in disability this year? Where has the money been consumed that was ring-fenced for capital budgets? Has it all been consumed by detailed design and tender stages and planning, or have we actually delivered tangible disability projects? I work closely with Corlann, formerly Brothers of Charity, and also Ability West in Galway. They are legacy organisations. They have sites and they have space. Does the Minister of State know what they do not have? They have a huge service-level agreement with the HSE on how to deliver services and they obviously have their negotiations about funding, but they have no provision for capital funding to build the homes themselves that they could staff, man and where they could provide the respite support and the residential care. They then end up taking on more residential units and paying huge rents. Those end up being commercial leases. The people who go into residential care under the commercial lease, and Corlann and Ability West, do not get the same protections as a normal tenant would in a residential dwelling. As a result the organisations that this State is funding are subjected to crazy rent increases. One could not imagine how much residential care homes rents' to landlords, because they are not protected the way a residential lease is, but are under a commercial lease. If the €43 million in the disability capital budget has been primarily consumed by lengthy planning applications, tender stages and detailed designs but no real delivery, maybe it is time to change the way we do it. In the forthcoming budget, the Government should look at giving a devolved grant to the disability organisations around the country for capital projects exactly the way it works with education. One could say to Corlann or Ability West that we will give them €2 million this year and they can deliver the services. It is like sports capital. When you give it to an organisation with this modus operandi and drive, it will do an incredible job at delivering it.

I thank the Chair for giving me time to speak on what is an important amendment to the Disability Act. I welcome the amendment to the Disability Act on its narrow basis, which is to streamline the assessment of need process and ensure that assessments of need are not used as a barrier to accessing services. It is clear that the statutory guidelines will be changed, which will standardise the assessment of needs process nationally and provide consistency throughout the country. That is to be welcomed. It is also to be welcomed that the assessments of need will not be used as a barrier to therapies within the HSE or access to special education in future and that there will be other pathways for children who have special and additional needs to have access to those therapies and assessments. I welcome the 11 new in-reach teams which will include an occupational therapist, speech therapist, psychologist and an administrator to help professionals within the service to carry out these assessments that will allow children to access therapies in a timely way. The Minister and Minister of State have brought considerable focus to trying to streamline access to services like the single point of contact with the HSE. Clinicians and professionals in the community will be able to refer to a single point in the HSE. That decision on whether children are to be seen by primary care, CAMHS or a CDNT will be made in-house and not be sent back to a general practitioner to reapply for that service. The advent of the autism assessment intervention pathways is also to be welcomed and will hopefully take away some of the pressure on the assessment of needs requirement. All of those are welcome developments and the changes that are proposed under this amendment are also welcome. I have to put this into context as well. I am aware of the focus that has been brought by having the disability unit in the Department of the Taoiseach and of the increased funding of €3.8 billion this year which came with that. However, it is incumbent on the Government and the Department to ensure that these changes are not perceived to be in some way reducing waiting lists and creating a false narrative around the access to therapy. It is true that we do not have the capacity that we require under all the different services, whether CDNTs, primary care, CAMHS or special education in schools, and that we do not have the capacity to deal with all the young people who require those therapies and interventions. It is really important that the Government recommits to ensuring that the required professionals, both in the community and in the different organisations, are recruited and retained within the system in order to provide these services. If you are telling someone that there is no longer a barrier of having to have an assessment of need in order to gain access to various therapies in circumstances where people can directly access those therapies but where there are no therapists available to provide them, then the Bill will mean nothing. It is important to point out that the delivery of special classes throughout the country has improved. However, there are companies which provide modular school buildings and which have good records in doing so but which are finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the building unit in the Department of education when it comes to the provision of schools and special classrooms. I need to put that on the record. We need to streamline our procurement processes to make it easier and to provide more competition within the sector to provide this necessary infrastructure. I will give an example. We have three building companies, modular companies, who have an agrément from the NCAI, which allows them to build these schools. They have track records on that. One of them in particular is precluded from a framework within the Department of education and that is something that is to be regretted. I am going to come back to personal stories. I received a letter from a paediatrician yesterday who referred a young person who has generalised anxiety to the local CAMHS service in County Galway. That paediatrician received a letter back without the CAMHS service seeing that adolescent and essentially pointed them in a different direction, to counselling services in the community and other such things. That consultant paediatrician had made a clinical assessment of that adolescent and had felt that the young boy deserved an assessment by a CAMHS team but was simply rebuffed by another part of the service. I met a young mother the other day who has an 11-year-old young person with autism and has had a very difficult time in gaining access to services. There is a lack of communication between primary care, CDNT and CAMHS and the only people who suffer in this regard are the children and the parents who are involved.

I hope the Minister of State has listened very carefully to the many speakers in this House. I have sat in for most of the debate and I think it is clear from Members of the Opposition, as well as her own party and Government backbenchers, that this Bill does not actually deal with the nub of the issue. If the issue in terms of assessments of need was that we have far too many children on the waiting list who do not actually need to be on the waiting list and we need to remove them from the waiting list, then this Bill might be in some way useful. That is not the issue, however. Time and again, the actual issue is raised. The issue is that we do not have the workforce or the therapists to meet the needs that are there in terms of children that need supports. The only question that we should be answering in terms of any legislation - whether legislation is actually needed or not in the first place - is how do we get children who have additional needs the support that they need when they need it, which is now, how do we access those children and how do we ensure the easiest way for them to receive the supports. As my colleague, Deputy Ó Murchú, has said many times, at this stage it probably is the schools. It probably is having the therapies in the school setting and the supports and the services actually going to the children, rather than the other way around. In Roscommon and Galway, the people whom I represent, are in no way different to many parts of the State; in fact, every single county in the state. We have had a situation in Galway in particular where the number of overdue assessments of need has more than doubled. The average wait time now is 24 months, that is, two years. Looking at the data for quarter 1 of this year, four assessments of need were completed in Galway and eight were completed in that same period in County Roscommon. There are questions that have been raised here in terms of the guidelines and what those guidelines will look like, as well as assessment officers, who they will be, what their backgrounds will be and whether they will have any clinical expertise. Those questions need to be answered and they should really be answered in legislation like this or at least in this House. For a lot of people out there, this is just going to look like another layer. It is another layer on another layer. We are talking about 11 in-reach teams when we cannot staff our CDNTs in many parts of the country, we cannot staff or retain our primary care therapists, and now we are going to have another layer of more therapists when, in reality, those therapists are not there. That is the nub of the issue and I do not believe that this Bill will deal with the actual issue, which is workforce. That is really concerning. Issues have been raised in terms of therapists coming home. More can be done on that, particularly those who are educated and receive their professional degrees in England, for example. There have been difficulties in that regard. For parents looking in, however, it is one issue after the other. It is the school place, the SNA, and July provision. As for dental checks, when I was in school, you got two or three dental checks but now a child is lucky to get one. We are going backwards in terms of basic supports and services for children. Again, I come back to the primary question, namely, how do we get children with additional needs the supports that they need when they need them? I do not believe, unfortunately, that this Bill is going to do that.

I will start echoing the sentiment Forest E. Witcraft, who said, 100 years from now it will not matter what his bank account was, the car he drove or what house he lived in, but what will matter is the difference that he made in the life of a child. That is integral to what we are discussing here, namely, meeting the needs and embedding rights into our legislation. I will try to confine my comments to this amendment to the 2005 Act. This came about from a 2023 report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. It recommended that Ireland should review the relevant legislation, including disability legislation, the EPSEN Act and Equality Acts to bring them in line with a human rights-based approach to disability. I am aware that the six-month right is enshrined. That is not changing; it is its delivery and pivotal to that is reducing waiting times and urgently addressing staff shortages. I acknowledge the initiatives to extend the third level placements for occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and educational psychologists. I would also like to commend Dunboyne College of Further Education, which runs gateway courses for speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. I have actually linked Catherine Fox, the principal, with the HSE and the school of nursing in Maynooth. They have that memorandum of understanding already. There are things that can be done proactively. If we go back to the rights piece, however, that is effectively what we are dealing with here. Next month, I think, Professor Noel Purdy and the inclusive education task force that has been convened will begin their work in earnest. They have a six-month timeframe to work through. That is dealing with the review and the implementation and the action plans from the review of the EPSEN Act. Again, that is feeding into the delivery of services. I do not for one minute deny the fact that recruitment is key to all of this. In terms of the committee deliberations, I thank the secretariat, the Library and Research Service, the individual parents who wrote into the committee and the 16 different stakeholder groups who put a huge amount of time and effort into the submissions to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. The Minister of State has the report from the committee and its recommendations, particularly the cross-cutting recommendations. In particular, I raise recommendation No. 26 on page 20. Key to that is the recruitment piece and again, every possible opportunity to recruit from abroad to retain the graduates that we train here. Perhaps there is a contractual piece that can be done there whereby we prioritise our graduates to come back after they have travelled abroad. There is another key piece in the report in relation to recommendation No. 29. It calls for a review of the legislation 12 months from commencement, as well as a further review within 24 months. That is pivotal. Areas that were of concern to me included, I have to admit, section 4 regarding the deemed withdrawal but I am pleased to hear and to read of the reinstatement and the fact that families can reapply within 12 months. That was an area of concern but I am pleased to see that it is proposed to be addressed. In relation to section 6, the Ombudsman for Children's Office had raised concerns. We discussed them at the committee, as well as the statutory guidelines. They are also very welcome. Last week, I met the Meath disability services team manager and we went through recruitment. We have identified the shortfall in places for OTs, speech and language therapy and child psychology in the Trim area CDNT. That is having a serious knock-on effect. I suggested to her, as I have done with the Minister of State previously, that waiting list initiatives should include access to integrative therapies relating to all the things we included in our inclusive education report, namely art therapy, drama, equine therapy, music, nurture rooms, sensory rooms. We can meet some of the needs of children while the families wait by being creative and by complying with legislation. The Department did it this summer with the alternative respite funding that was made available. I ask that where, in the context of children who are not in special classes or special schools, if a teacher or an early years educator identifies a need - they are professionals after all - the Department should take their word for it and expand the wait list initiative and alternative respite funding. That will allow us to hit the ground running. There is an excellent service, Ability Equine Assisted Therapy, in north Meath. It is at risk of being wound up. It is a charity and everything is above board, but those involved are so busy trying to meet the needs of families in north Meath that have children who may have regulation or behavioural issues or occupational therapy issues. There are good people doing good work, and we need to be creative with the framework to support them.

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta Toole. Bíonn sí i gcónaí ag teacht isteach sa Teach seo chun solutions a thabhairt. I commend her on her work on the disability committee. I also commend the Minister of State and her staff on the Bill and the sensible measures it contains and on the work that has been done. I will always support anything that makes the process faster, clearer and more consistent for every parent and child across Ireland. There are definitely good provisions in the Bill. I commend the standardising of the process across the six health regions. If this is done right, it will be life-changing. Giving the families the proper mechanisms to withdraw applications temporarily and reinstate it makes sense. I really welcome that. Some of the parents I have spoken to are happy and feel like they are being listened to. However, there will always be something I will look to add. We need to be clear about the scale of what is involved. There are thousands of overdue applications for assessments of need. I have submitted parliamentary questions on this matter. Changing the process will help, but we cannot just change the process. We must also change capacity and what will happen to the child and their family after they get an assessment. That is what parents keep telling me and that is what I will keep pushing for. I recently spoke to a mother in Dublin Central - she is watching me right now – about access to her son’s OT. I have emailed the Department and all the stakeholders involved. Her point is very straightforward. Families continually hear about increased budgets, new posts and additional investment but this means very little when their child is still waiting for an appointment. There is a huge issue with OTs in Dublin Central. I would love the Department to investigate this and see what can be done. Dublin Central is not my constituency and this is not something I would generally raise, but the woman in question is a very passionate and solution-focused mother and I wanted to raise her case. There are other things we need to look at. I have raised this with Deputy Carrigy when the Oireachtas committee was focusing on autism with in relation to CORU and the recognition of foreign-qualified practitioners who can help with our waiting lists. The Department responded to some of my parliamentary questions by saying that it will investigate the possibilities in this regard. I am looking for an update on speech and language therapists and OTs who qualified in other EU countries. Sometimes they are missing one qualification that does not allow them to practise here but if they went to the US, Australia or Canada, they could practise. I do not understand when we are in an acute crisis that this is the case. It is not just a case of how many posts there are. We also really need to look at the regulatory bottlenecks. Another point that coincides with this is one that is not specific to disabilities. I was speaking to people in Athletic Rehabilitation Therapy Ireland, ARTI, about waiting lists for AT. They raised a very reasonable question which underlines my point. If appropriately qualified professionals could assist in reducing pressure on services but the barrier to doing so is regulation and policy, why can we not speed that up? I ask the Minister of State to examine not only ARTI’s position but the wider CORU recognition and regulatory process so as to speed up qualification recognition and so reduce waiting lists. The disconnect between the unidentified needs does exist and needs to be addressed. Going back to my constituency, there is a documentary by Eric Roberts relating to Stapolin Educate Together National School. I have raised this multiple times in the House. The Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, visited the school and was brilliant on site. He has constantly engaged with my office, and I welcome that. I would love for the Minister of State or any of her staff to address this matter too. The school has already been awarded three special classes. It has applied for two additional special needs modular rooms. I was informed by the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, on Friday that the application is currently under consideration. If anything can be done on that, I would really welcome it. This goes back to the point that if we granting assessments, we have the data that the children are there. The school in question is saying it will provide the places. We need to be able to respond quicker to that and to CORU regulations. It is another part of the conversation we cannot ignore.

I welcome the Disability (Amendment) Bill and any improvements it will make to the assessment of needs process relating to children. We have spoken at length here about children with disabilities and adult children with disabilities. In Kerry, their lot has not improved much. I am asking again for the Government to be more meaningful and to mean what it says. There are far too many families with additional needs and disabilities who are waiting far too long for their assessments of needs as well as other appointments of speech and language therapists, occupational therapists or physiotherapists and SNAs. We have been waiting, and there is a serious lack of all those people. Early intervention is crucial for a child with additional needs. It is shameful to see the length of time children have to wait for an assessment. Many are obliged to wait years. When a baby is born and grows up a little, the parents sometimes find that something is lacking or wrong. They want the best for their child, which is only natural. The cost that they have to bear could be for all their lives as they want to improve the lot of that child. There is a shortage of staff in all these areas, and positions do not seem to be filled when someone is transferred or goes out on leave. It is not fair on these families that they have to wait so long and fight for their children to receive the treatments they need. Many families have no option but to pay out for private assessments or therapies even if they cannot afford it. Many cannot afford it and have to go short on something else. They dearly love their children and they want them to have the best so they will do anything or go short themselves to ensure that they get those things. It is not fair that in many instances the State is leaving these families behind. Then there are adult children. I have a serious concern about elderly parents caring for elderly adult children who have disabilities and special needs. These parents contact me. Their main concern is what will happen to their adult child should something happen to either one or both of them. That is a serious concern for these people. I worry when I see what these adult parents have gone through all their lives and what they continue to do on a daily basis. They have to bring their children into Killarney to attend day centres. It is unfair that these elderly parents are not provided with the necessary respite care or options for respite to give family members a well-earned rest. There is a huge shortage of residential care for adults with disabilities. I again ask that the Government consider St. Mary of the Angels, which has been and continues to be closed by stealth. It is an ideal location that should be considered to provide respite, as it is badly needed. St. Mary of the Angels is in the heart of mid-Kerry, in Beaufort. It was a farm given free to the health services by the Doyle family, going back in time. It is an ideal place to improve and to have more respite there rather than sending adult children who need respite up the country to Tipperary and, in one case, to County Meath. That is not fair on the people in Kerry who are trying to see after and to mind adult children and to get a break in sending them to respite services. I appeal to the Government. There is a Fianna Fáil Minister in Kerry, and I ask her to do her utmost to ensure that St. Mary of the Angels is opened up properly and developed.

The starting point for any discussion on this Bill must be the reality facing families in Offaly. Last year, I revealed that 525 children across the children's disability networks serving County Offaly were waiting for an assessment of need. Families are entitled to ask why, after years of reviews, strategies and reform programmes, waiting lists remain unacceptably high and legal timelines continue to be breached. The State's first duty must be to ensure that children receive assessments and supports when they need them and not years later. The experience of families across Offaly demonstrates that disability services remain under immense pressure. While the Bill focuses heavily on assessment processes, legislators must be honest about the real issue. The greatest challenge is not paperwork or procedure but the chronic shortage of qualified professionals available to deliver the services that are so badly needed. Recent information I received from the HSE highlights clearly just how severe the staffing crisis has become. The sole speech and language therapist post serving adults with intellectual disabilities across Laois and Offaly has remained vacant since May 2023, with repeated recruitment efforts unsuccessful and no clear timelines for filling the position. I was appalled to learn that the same strategy - the same recruitment procedure - that had clearly failed was still in place after three years, it appears that this issue was not escalated to senior management of the HSE, and people were expected to wait. I am appalled by this because it is nothing short of neglect. I feel there are solutions. I have mentioned lots of times in this Chamber that therapists need to be redeployed into Offaly from regions where it is not as bad as this. Laois and Offaly are definitely the worst in the State when it comes to the lack of therapists. Of course, I commend the therapists we have, who are trying to hold a broken system together, but they need help. I cannot understand why therapists from the other CHO areas, where there is not a backlog, cannot be brought in in addition to private therapists. People are really being failed, and it is appalling and unfair to continue with such an approach. The fact that a key disability service can remain without a specialist provision for more than three years should be a wake-up call as to how urgent the situation is in County Offaly and County Laois. It raises profound questions about workforce planning, staff retention and the ability of the State to meet even basic standards of care. Any reform of the assessment of need process will fail if the Government does not address recruitment and retention. Assessments alone do not help children and adults unless the therapists, psychologists and specialists needed to provide services are actually in place and available. Front-line staff continue to work under immense pressure and deserve the recognition for their commitment, as I have previously stated. The failures within disability services stem from systemic workforce shortages, not from the dedication of professionals on the ground. I ask that Offaly be made a priority because we have too many failures. We have struggled for many years with the lack of speech and language therapists and the lack of occupational therapists. I had a case earlier this year where an elderly gentleman who had worked all his life and paid his taxes was waiting and waiting for a basic assessment to be carried out. Nine medical referrals were sent on his behalf. That is shocking. We need to collaborate and we need to put solutions in place urgently. I call for my county of Offaly to be prioritised with therapists.

Tá fáilte rompu. As Minister of State with responsibility for disability, I am pleased to conclude this Second Stage debate on the Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026. I thank all Deputies for their contributions and their insights, which the Minister, Norma Foley, and I will reflect on as this legislation moves through the next Stage. I also want to take this opportunity to respond to some of the points that have been raised during the debate. As the Minister outlined, the Bill makes very specific and targeted changes to Part 2 of the Disability Act 2005, which sets out the assessment of need process. Since the principle Act was commenced over 20 years ago, demand for assessments of need has continued to grow, particularly in recent years. There are a number of reasons for this. Our population has grown. There is greater awareness of disability and developmental needs and greater awareness among families of the assessment of need process and the supports available to help children reach their full potential. That is positive but it has also placed very significant additional pressure on a system that was not designed to deal with the level of demand we now see. The scale of this increase has been significant. Between 2022 and 2025, applications for assessments of need doubled. In the first six months of this year alone, 7,100 applications were made to the HSE. The simple reality is that demand has grown beyond the capacity of the current system to process applications in a timely way, and that has contributed to an unacceptable backlog of overdue applications. When we talk about a backlog, it is really important that we not lose sight of what that means. It means that behind every application is a child or a young person and their family, who have a very reasonable expectation that their application will be processed within the statutory timeframe. Unfortunately, however, that is not the reality for many families today, so there is a clear need to improve how the current system operates. That is the context in which we bring forward this Bill. It is intended to modernise and strengthen the assessment of need process in order that it can operate more effectively and consistently in the face of growing demand. The changes are specific but important. The first is to support a more needs-based approach to assessment. The Bill updates a number of terms used within the legislation to place greater emphasis on the restrictions a person experiences in their daily life and the needs arising from those restrictions, rather than focusing solely on disability as a diagnosis. That is an important shift because it brings our legislation more closely into line with Ireland's commitments under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD. It also reflects the wider direction in which we are moving across disability, health and education services. Increasingly, the focus is on the individual and on what the person needs in order to participate fully in everyday life. As this next part was queried by a number of Deputies earlier, I want to be very clear in saying that these changes do not alter a person's rights or entitlements under the Disability Act. What they do is better reflect the broader move towards understanding and responding to a person's individual needs. This change is only one part of improving the process. We also need to look at how the assessment of need process operates in practice and at the people responsible for delivering it. In that regard, I acknowledge the important work carried out every day by HSE assessment officers and liaison officers. They play a vital role supporting children and families through what can be a complex process. They do that work against a backdrop of significant demand and pressure on the system. Given the scale of that demand, it is important that there are greater clarity and consistency about how the assessment of need process operates in practice for staff delivering it and for families engaging with it. That is why a key element of this Bill is the introduction of statutory guidelines for assessment officers. These guidelines will provide a clear framework for the assessment of need process and support a more consistent approach across the country. They will standardise key aspects of the process across all six health regions and provide greater clarity for assessment officers in carrying out their responsibilities. That consistency also matters for families and children. The experience of applying for assessment of need should not vary significantly depending on where a family needs or where an application is being processed. By providing for the publication of these guidelines by the HSE, the Bill will also give families a clearer understanding of the process, what they can expect from it and how their application will progress. The Bill also deals with an issue that has become increasingly relevant as the number of applications has grown. Those are applications that are no longer being actively processed. This was raised by a number of Deputies in today's debate so I will elaborate. There can be many reasons that an application is no longer actively progressed. Family circumstances may have changed. They may decide they do not wish to continue with the process. They may simply just not be in a position to engage with it at that particular time. In many cases families may have relocated abroad or returned to their country of origin and are no longer in a position to continue with an assessment of need application in Ireland. The Bill therefore provides a clear basis for the withdrawal and closure of applications but importantly, as Deputy Toole referenced, it allows an application to be reinstated within 12 months. That is important because it is providing flexibility for families. I agree with Deputies who said that a decision to not continue with an assessment at one point in time should not create an unnecessary barrier if circumstances subsequently change. That is why the reinstatement provision is there. It provides a straightforward way back into the process and that is particularly relevant. At the same time, where an application is no longer active, such as where a family has moved abroad, the HSE needs to be able to reflect that accurately in the management of the overall caseload. That is important given the scale of the backlog we are dealing with. I appreciate that a number of Deputies raised concerns about provisions on deemed withdrawal, and I hope that explains the safeguards in place. As the Minister, Deputy Foley, outlined, the related regulations will set out the conditions that must be met before an application can be deemed to be withdrawn, and they provide for a clear and accessible process for reinstating an application if it is required. I also want to be clear about what these provisions do not do. They do not remove the right to apply for an assessment of need. They do not remove the statutory timeframe. They do not change the underlying rights provided for in the principal Act. It is really important in understanding the scope of the Bill that we are clear on that. We are making targeted changes to improve the operation of the existing process. We are not suggesting that those changes on their own will address every issue within the Act or the Act more broadly. There are wider questions about the legislation that need to be considered and that work is under way through the broader review of the Disability Act 2005. That review gives us the opportunity to look at the Act as a whole more than 20 years after it was introduced to consider what further changes are required. A great deal has changed in that time and in Ireland's obligations following the ratification of the UNCRPD. This review will allow us to consider those issues properly and to ensure that our legislative framework reflects where we need to go next. Phase 1 of that consultation is open, and it will remain open until 9 October. I encourage people to take the opportunity to contribute. We are particularly interested in hearing from disabled people themselves, families, carers, representative organisations and DPOs. A further point is important in the context of today's debate. We can improve the legislation around assessment of need, and we can improve the process. We need to do both. Neither of those things on their own answers the wider issue facing families, which is access to supports and services. That was raised by so many Deputies. An assessment of need has an important role but you do not need an assessment of need to access services. Many children are already receiving supports through primary care services, CDNTs or CAMHS while awaiting assessment of need. It is important to state that. It is also equally important that we do not underestimate what an assessment of need means to families. For many parents, it is about much more than completing a statutory process. It can provide clarity about their child's needs. It can provide formal recognition of those needs. After what can sometimes seem like a long period of uncertainty, that recognition matters. When families are waiting beyond the statutory timeframe, of course there is frustration and anxiety. That is why our response has to go further than addressing the assessment of need process alone. The real objective has to be a system where identifying a child's need leads to the right support being available at the right time. That requires progress across disability and health services, and across education. That is what we are committed to doing. We are continuing to recruit additional staff to our CDNTs. Many Deputies have asked about that. The HSE single point of access model will be rolled out to make the route into services clearer for families, and the autism assessment and intervention pathway protocol will be implemented to support a more consistent and timely approach to autism assessment. There is also a really important piece of work happening in education. We are working with colleagues in the Department of education on a more needs-led approach to educational provision. This is where all the different strands of work come together. The assessment of need process needs to work better. The wider legislative framework needs to be reviewed. Ultimately, families will judge processes by their experience of the system and whether their child can get the support they need. That is the wider programme of reform of which this Bill is a part. I do not want to overstate what this legislation will achieve but I point out that this wider programme of reform is so important to ensure that we progress this issue for families and their children.