A Place Called Home for Adults with an Intellectual Disability: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-07-08 ============================================================ Liam Quaide (SD), Cork East I came here today in a genuine spirit of constructive engagement with Government. I have no interest in reducing this crisis to party politics, but I have to say the response of the Minister, Deputy Foley, and that of the Minister of State, to this motion has left me utterly deflated. I have no doubt that sentiment will be shared by many people who have tuned in today who are counting on Government to take comprehensive and decisive action on this crisis. Out of a ten-minute statement, the Minister, Deputy Foley, spent eight minutes on broad statements, aspirations from Government, future strategies and general concern. She only engaged with the actual substance of this motion in the final couple of minutes, and I did not detect any engagement with the motion on the Minister of State's part. That is exactly the problem families are facing; generalities instead of commitments, process instead of urgency and strategy instead of action. This motion is about people with intellectual disabilities living far from home, parents in their 70s, 80s and 90s being terrified about what happens when they are gone and families being left in a state of constant worry and stress because successive Governments have failed to plan. What we needed today was a reckoning with that failure and leadership in addressing it. What we got instead was a rehearsal of perceived Government achievements that are not being felt by families on the ground and more vague gesturing towards future strategies. I do not say that lightly. There was no clear commitment to a national plan for people living many miles from home. The contention that the HSE does its best to offer placements close to a person’s community, in line with his or her will and preference, could not be more detached from reality. There was no real answer on the growth of private provision. We know that the proportion of services being provided by private operators is increasing significantly year on year and that is hugely problematic. Families have waited long enough. They do not need another promise that a strategy may emerge at some point in the future. They need a Government willing to face the scale of the crisis now. There was a passing reference to working towards multi-annual funding in the Minister's response. Our non-profit disability providers are unanimous in their message to us in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. They cannot develop services and they cannot plan for the future under the current year-on-year model. We have drifted into an expensive crisis-led model. The proportion of residential placements provided by for-profit companies has approximately doubled from around 7% in 2022 to over 15% in the latest figures. That did not happen because of a clear rights-based strategy. It happened because the State failed to build enough planned public and not-for-profit capacity. An example shared by the Muiríosa Foundation captures the absurdity of the current system. The Muiríosa Foundation is a respected not-for-profit provider operating across a wide geographical area that includes Laois, Offaly, Westmeath, Meath, Longford, Kildare, Tipperary and Kilkenny. Its CEO, Siobhán Bryan, told the Oireachtas Committee on Disability Matters in February that the Muiríosa Foundation was reliant on the private rental market for 46 of its 142 residential properties. It may spend tens of thousands of euro bringing its properties up to HIQA standards, and then potentially lose all of that investment if a landlord decides to sell. This is the predicament of many other service providers. This is one of the reasons service providers need multi-annual funding. Not only is there an immense human cost to the current fragmented, reactive system where residents may lose their home at the whim of a landlord, but the system makes no financial sense either. Meanwhile, for-profit companies are in a position to build up substantial property portfolios while long-standing not-for-profit providers are left trying to patch services together year on year. We need to see a full plan from the Government, with timelines, funding, accountability and a clear path away from crisis-led provision. It is important to say that this motion responds to one crisis, that of adults with an intellectual disability, often living with ageing parents, with no secure plan for the future. Today we are asking Government to face that crisis robustly, not with another strategy in the distance or soothing rhetoric about how great disabled people and their families are, but with the urgency, seriousness and leadership that families have been waiting years to see. --- 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/2026-07-08/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-08