Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-12
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Liam Quaide (SD), Cork East

The plight of ageing parents of adult children with intellectual disabilities is an area of abject neglect on the part of the Government. Many of these parents are being deprived of peace of mind in their later years because they remain the primary carers of their children. They are less physically able to carry out this role as time goes on. They are living with a constant background worry of not knowing where their children will live after they die and how their need for belonging and community will be met.
The Government’s privatisation of services means that both young people and adults who require 24-hour staffed residential support are increasingly living far from home, in some cases hundreds of kilometres away, not connected to wrap-around services, detached from their communities and families. What is the Taoiseach’s plan to address this particular crisis in residential services for people with intellectual disabilities? Why are these services being privatised and fragmented to such an extent when the outcomes in many cases are so poor for our disabled citizens and when the cost to the State is so enormous?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-12