Disability Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-21
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Liam Quaide (SD), Cork East

Does the Government accept that disability service delivery in this State has become extraordinarily fragmented and that this fragmentation is making it impossible to guarantee equity, to plan services properly or to ensure public money is being used in the most effective way? I ask this because a recent response to a parliamentary question of mine shows that the HSE now has approximately 1,172 service arrangements or grant aid agreements with over 494 organisations providing disability services on its behalf. This includes 226 private, for-profit companies. On paper, we talk about integrated, standardised, person-centred community services; in practice, what we have is a disjointed system that is haphazard, dispersed and, essentially, ungovernable. When services are channelled through hundreds of separate organisations, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to ensure a similar standard of support regardless of where a person lives. It also inevitably means waste through duplication, administration and contract management. What will the Government do to move towards a genuinely direct public provision of disability services, proper workforce planning and genuinely standardised rights-based support for disabled people and their families?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-21