Youth Services
Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-28
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Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West

I thank Senator Cosgrove for raising this important issue and giving us all the opportunity to commend the fantastic work happening on the ground. The service is absolutely amazing. We need many more such services across the country. I thank the Senator for the role she played in working with the service before becoming a Member of this House.
I, as Minister of State with responsibility for disability, alongside my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Norma Foley, remain fully committed to providing the necessary supports for children and young people with disabilities and their families throughout the country, including in Sligo and Leitrim.
In 2023, through its own consultation process, Sligo and Leitrim CYPSC identified that for young autistic people, there are poor transition support processes in place in terms of education, training and employment, as the Senator said herself. In response to this, on foot of significant collective planning and resource gathering by Sligo Leitrim CYPSC and the HYLS, an autism support officer was employed in May 2024 with the specific purpose of supporting autistic young people on a pilot basis.
Through its local funding programmes, which supported the local partners, Sligo Leitrim CYPSC put in place and evaluated this project. The project itself was developed to test and to evaluate the model with a view to then making a business case for funding and to mainstream the service. An evaluation of the project was completed and formally launched in December just gone.
It was launched to review the impact of the approach and the model of working. As the Senator said, it is a clear affirmation of the work being done on the ground. That evaluation report has recommended the project's expansion as a model of good practice and sets out the funding needs to expand the service. This would require mainstream funding to be identified because the existing funding resources available through the local partners will not be able to sustain the overall project in the long term. Recurring funding therefore, is required to secure, sustain and expand the service across the Sligo-Leitrim area. The HSE West and North West disability service met with the Sligo and Leitrim children and young people's services committee and the home youth liaison service in March of this year. The HSE service sought feedback on the home youth liaison service's autism support service from the CDNTs, primary care services and child and adolescent mental health services in the Sligo-Leitrim area, with feedback being overwhelmingly positive. The annual recurring funding requirement being sought by the home youth liaison service to sustain the autism support service and to expand same to all secondary schools in the Sligo area via the recruitment of a second autism support officer is €125,000. It has been agreed with the national HSE access and integration team that once-off funding of €78,125 will be used to support the service to the end of this year and that funding can be provided from within an identified allocation in the 2026 national service plan. This also includes the recruitment of a second autism support officer for the second half of this year. Arrangements are currently under way to have the required contractual arrangement between the HSE and the HYLS put in place in order to have the once-off 2026 funding drawn down by the home youth liaison service.
Further to a meeting of all parties on 13 April arrangements to progress the funding allocation will be progressed between the HSE West and North West disability services with the Sligo and Leitrim CYPSC co-ordinator and the HYLS manager. This will happen in the coming weeks. Consideration for further recurring funding for 2027 would be subject to the Estimates process and a new application funding form would therefore need to be submitted by the home youth liaison service

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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/2026-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-28