Disability Issues
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-03
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Pádraig O'Sullivan (FF), Cork North-Central

I too want to raise an issue around residential care, following on from Deputy Daly. The Taoiseach and I share a county and city. To be fair, his office was very helpful in the case I worked on with it over the past two weeks where a person required urgent residential intervention. The problem in a Cork context was that this young adult was diagnosed with a mild disability. To call a spade a spade, there are no residential opportunities for anybody with that categorisation in Cork, irrespective of their condition. That is happening in Cork at the moment. The county is essentially only dealing with emergency cases and cases are being managed on a week to week basis. At best, that is what people are trying to do. There is very little forward planning. I have met all of the service providers over the past few weeks. I am genuinely very concerned about the outlook for full-time residential care. I assume this is replicated in other parts of the country. We need to fund service providers adequately to provide accommodation. I thank the Taoiseach for meeting the Before We Die campaign, which is at the helm in terms of progressing the issue, and I hope he has more interaction with it in the next few weeks.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-03/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-03