Disability Matters: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-22 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel I welcome the Minister of State. The first thing I will raise is the Before We Die campaign. Like Senator Clonan, I think this is an issue of huge concern. This campaign was established by elderly parents who were caring for adult sons and daughters in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s and who were concerned about what was going to happen to those sons and daughters when the parents died. It is every person's right to have the option to live independently. If people do not quite know how to go about accessing housing, it seems they are just forgotten about. It is left up to them. It is seen as their responsibility. I have spoken to many parents whose son or daughter is on the county council housing list in their local area. When I engaged with the local authority, I was told it had houses ready to allocate to people. They do not need to be adapted if the person in question does not have a physical disability but many such people will need some sort of a care plan. That might just mean a support worker or it could mean a full-time carer. In order to allocate a house, whether from the authority's own stock or through an approved housing body, AHB, the authority needs the HSE to engage with it and to put that support plan in place, but that is not happening. When Housing for All was launched during the last Dáil term, we were assured that there would be better co-operation between local authorities and the HSE to ensure that this would happen. It is not happening on the ground. There is clear frustration on the part of the local authorities. They organise a meeting with the HSE to discuss the allocation of housing and putting a support plan in place - I am talking about my own local authority in Cavan but I am sure it is happening across the board - and then, with very little notice, the HSE does not turn up for the meeting. There is very little engagement. I contacted the HSE in my local integrated healthcare area, Cavan-Monaghan, and asked for a breakdown of the numbers in the area. I am told there are 87 people in Cavan who are engaged as service users and who have a disability and will require housing. I am not sure if that is the full number or just the number of people the HSE knows about. I was also told there are 25 emergency cases. I assume an emergency case is a case where the parent has passed away or is no longer able to care for the person in question. That means the son or daughter with an intellectual disability, autism, a physical disability or a combination of those conditions ends up being placed in a residential setting. That could be outside the county, meaning they are not able to attend their day service, to see family and friends or to live in their own community. I forget the exact number - it could be as many as 20 - but there are also quite a number of Cavan people who have been placed in residential settings outside the county. Many of them want to come back to live in Cavan and were told at the time that this was a temporary measure and that they would be facilitated in Cavan when a place became available. However, when you query those cases, you are told these people are settled, okay and already accommodated. That is not their wish or the wish of their families. I spoke to one man who was 79 and who was caring for his daughter, who was in her early 40s. She attends a day service. He told me he was not able for it any more. There is also a question of dignity here. This is a man caring for his daughter. While carers come in at certain times of the day to shower her or dress her, these are set times. They are not there every time she requires washing or so on. Like many other parents, he is afraid that, if something happens to him or he passes away, his daughter will not only be grieving for him but also having to get used to a new setting where she might know nobody. She might be far away from everything that is familiar. It needs to be dealt with immediately. It is not just about money. It is about different agencies working together to make sure this happens. We also still have quite a number of people in congregated settings. I believe 2018 was the time set to move on from congregated settings. We are now eight years on from that and there are still people there. With regard to the CDNTs, there have been improvements in their staffing levels but they are still not 100% staffed. Speech and language therapy is an issue of huge concern. There are not enough speech and language therapists. I am not even sure that the initial make-up of the teams is sufficient to deal with the increased demand and significant backlog. The Minister of State said the backlog had come down but there are still over 9,000 children on waiting lists. One mother told me that, when her daughter was about 18 months old, she realised that there was an issue with her speech. She brought her to be assessed and she was found to be autistic. She was practically non-verbal. She had about five different words. This mother was in a position to access a private speech and language therapist for her daughter. Her daughter is now 7 or 8 and speaks perfectly. This proves that, if children get the interventions they need at an early age, they can overcome many issues. A lot of children get frustrated and lash out at school or in other settings because of their inability to communicate. Speech and language therapy and finding alternative ways to communicate, whether through assistive technology or some other method, is very important. Again, that is not happening widely to ensure that children can live their best lives and cope with whatever is coming up, whether in the school setting or elsewhere. I know primary care does not come under the Minister of State's Department but under the Department of Health. However, there has to be a connection between the two. Again, I see children waiting for years for an appointment to be seen by a physical therapist, an occupational therapist or a speech and language therapist. It is the same across the board. I am also concerned that the CDNTs seem to be in the habit of saying they have had contact with a child or that a child has had a given number of appointments when this may just have been engagement with the parents or phone calls. It is not necessarily the one-to-one therapy that the child needs. That also needs to be addressed. It is almost like they are painting a better picture than is actually the case. While strictly speaking the cost of disability also comes under a different Department, it is a huge issue. In the budgets for last year and the year before, everybody got energy credits but there were also additional payments made to people in receipt of disability payments. We heard a lot about disability in the general election campaign of 2024 but there was nothing in the first budget introduced by the new Government for people with a disability. People with a disability say they feel they are down an average of €1,400 compared to previous years. We need to see a stable cost-of-disability payment that recognises the significant additional costs to families who have a disabled member. The Indecon research into the cost of disability showed that the difference between the costs faced by a family without a person with a disability and those for a family with such a person was huge and was only increasing as the cost of living increased. There is an insufficient number of carers on the ground. The Minister of State has said there are going to be increased supports for carers but we do not have enough of them. We need to look at how we can get more home support carers in. One woman was in contact with me. She is a wheelchair user and has been very independent all her life but she is now getting older, has issues and needs support. She has been approved for home care hours but there is no carer available to fulfil those hours. We need to think outside the box as to how we can get more people to take on caring roles in the community. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-22