Cabinet Committees Dail Éireann — 2026-06-09 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central They have not heard anything. I will follow up because it is now June. If people want to get enrolled by September something has to happen. I will raise it with the Minister of State, Michael Moynihan and the Minister, Hildegarde Naughton. Deputy O'Rourke said the meeting to consider the drug for Duchenne is tomorrow. I hope we will get a positive outcome from that and can make progress. There has been a fair degree of representation and advocacy in that regard from both Houses. Deputy Wall raised St. Anne's special school in the Curragh. That is a new school project. It is at stage 2B. We will engage with the Minister in respect of that. This is a special school that needs to be provided. Deputy Tóibín heard Deputy Mark Ward and others talking about access to services. The existing system is not working at all. In fact, it is exacerbating the situation. It has meant there are fewer therapists available for services than for assessments. We are trying to get a more common-sense approach to this, so that the preponderance of therapy would be allocated to children in the earlier stages and they would have access to the therapists much earlier than they have currently. We need to do more, look at how therapists are deployed and ask how we can get the maximum outcomes from interventions. Deputy Heneghan raised the northside home care workers, which I spoke about earlier. I also spoke about Friedreich's ataxia. I will come back to him about the home care workers; I think I have already outlined to Deputy Quaide and other Deputies the situation with Friedreich's ataxia. Deputy Ward raised waiting times for disabilities. Early intervention is key. That is why we are doing the reforms that we are doing. Not everybody likes it, but we believe it is better to do it the way we are proposing so we get the therapies to the people faster and get earlier interventions than is currently the case. --- 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/dail/2026-06-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-09