Disability Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-19
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Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West

There are 45,000 children receiving support and therapies through our CDNTs nationally and that is really positive. We are embarking on a recruitment campaign to make sure we are bolstering our teams. Part of that will be international and national recruitment but it will also be making sure, for example, that we are expanding training places, which happened in June of last year. There will be up to 461 additional student places by the end of 2028 and the majority of those have commenced. New roles and training pathways are being developed to expand the skills mix and the pipeline of people we can hire. We have student bursaries and trainee programmes. We found them really successful in regard to people coming to do their student placements with CDNTs and, on graduation, being offered roles on those teams. We want to see more of that, and I thank all of our students who have taken up roles.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-19