Disability Matters: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-22 ============================================================ Anne Rabbitte (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach I thank the Minister of State for coming into the House this evening and giving us an in-depth response on where exactly things sit with her and her officials within her Department. Her response is very welcome. The allocation in the 2020 budget has grown by approximately 90%. When I took over in 2020, the amount was €2.1 billion and today it is €3.9 billion. The Minister of State's job is to drive policy and ensure she gets as much money into the sector as possible so the HSE can operationalise it. I fully realise she understands the frustration of Senators this evening, because sometimes operationalisation does not go far enough. There is a complete inequality around some of the REOs. I do not need to tell the Minister of State that because I see her out and about and engaging. I have 100% confidence in her and her team, and in what they are doing. I know she cares. That is an important part. The Minister of State has empathy, gets it and cares. While I did not attend the committee proceedings this morning, I watched them. A really good project from about three years ago was called Living my Life. It will not solve the problem but it will address it. During my time as Minister of State, I heard exactly what parents were saying. They were growing older and did not know whether they would have the ability to care. A lot of funding goes towards emergencies. When funding is addressing an emergency, the cost is three or four times greater because there will have been no plan in place. Through the Living my Life project, a pilot project down in Galway funded for over three years, we brought Ability West and the Brothers of Charity together in conjunction with the HSE. We got the city council and county council together as well. We provided enough funding to hire an occupational therapist, a physiotherapist and a psychologist. The whole purpose was to work with the families, find the people with needs and have people work together. The Minister of State is not a landlord. It is the job of the local authorities to step up to the plate and provide her with universally designed housing that people can access. The Minister of State's ask within her strategy is huge, involving something like 900 houses. Let us just take one little bite off the elephant. Let us start with the pilot project. The pilot project was for approximately €1.3 million to support 33 young adults into supported and independent living. To date, 24 have gone through and the most recent year is coming. It was slow to start and to get entire buy-in because it is a different way of doing business. The different way of doing business is that we need the providers to work together. We cannot have silos, the same as we cannot have silos within Departments. We need the different providers to come together in the different areas and put the people with need at the centre and say we can use the Minister's money a bit differently. With that, we have found beautiful apartments in Letterfrack where there are three people living independently. There is also a residential house across from it that can be supported with the staff. We have corner units from the city council. Galway City Council has been good on this. While we have a programme for Government in housing, we should at the same time have a programme for Government to ensure there is housing left aside to support people so we get that early intervention. I ask the Minister of State to expand that pilot project nationwide, put it into every single local authority and call in every provider in all of the local authorities to sit down with her and the HSE and ask them to take off 30 houses each. The template is done. We already have the OT, the physio, the social care and the psychologist. We are able to do it there and it is ready to go. We have really good people in our local authorities and have seen what has happened with Age Action Ireland through the Meath local authority. It was able to provide that secretariat support. This is what we need to do. I think it will address a lot of issues for the ageing parents to know there is a plan and pathway. I believe the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, is the one to do this. --- 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