Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23
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Mark Wall (LAB), Kildare South

I welcome the Minister. I also welcome the intent she has displayed in bringing this Bill forward to make changes to the process relating to assessments of need. While I agree that legislative reform is necessary, I am of the view that the proposed changes presented in this Bill do not address the key issues of resourcing and funding. The needs of children should be met by the State through the provision of well-resourced public health and education services. We all know that early intervention is vital but, shamefully, far too many young children are failed by an under-resourced and overstretched system for assessment and in the context of the provision of essential supports and therapies once diagnosis is secured.
At the end of last year the Government promised targeted reforms to the assessment of need, with the Minister for Education and Youth stating that the system is no longer fit for purpose. This Bill is not the targeted reform parents and their children need. This Bill is short-termist, with piecemeal changes that will have absolutely no real or tangible impact on children and their families.
Every day of the week I try to support families who are being failed by the Government because they cannot get access to the essential therapies they need and deserve. Some 90% of children are not seen within the six-month limit, as required under the Disability Act. The average waiting times have now stretched to more than two years. We have a system that is unable to cope with the demand and it is shortly going to implode.
Only this week, I have been supporting multiple families who cannot get an assessment of need or access to vital therapies. I will give an example from one constituent in Kildare South. It states:
We applied for the Assessment of Need in May 2023, we were advised that an assessment would be completed no later than November 2023, as per the legal requirements. However, this did not happen and I went through the complaints procedure, and received further notification that an assessment would be completed no later than September 2024.
The person involved stated that another two years have passed since the previous deadline and that it has been almost three years since the initial application, which is far too long when it concerns the well-being of her daughter.
Another family of a young child I am working with in Newbridge has been waiting over a year and, equally as important, that child is still without a special school place. That is the harsh reality for many families I am working with throughout Kildare South, as are many of my colleagues in the Labour Party. I have had families tell me that they are forking thousands of euro on services that should be and must be delivered by the State. They are eating into savings and college funds and taking out loans and going to credit unions just to get access for their children to the services they need.
The Minister previously announced the 11 new in-reach teams to provide clinical guidance and support for clinicians performing assessments. The Government can barely staff the CDNT teams throughout the country. Only recently I received a reply from the HSE west and central Kildare area that they are still recruiting for an assessment officer. The most recent figures available to me also show that, as of October 2025, there was an 18% vacancy rate across positions in CDNTs, with over 450 positions unfilled. Vacancies include those key and vital therapies, with 27% of occupational therapies and 44% of clinical psychologists unfilled. Will the Minister provide an update to the House today on the actions her Department is taking to address the workforce challenges we are all seeing right across the State in every area.
As well as that, the reply to the parliamentary question also informed me that they are relying on private providers to increase the capacity of assessments and decrease waiting times. I believe every resource of the State should be used to tackle these issues. However, could the Minister clarify how much the State is paying to private providers at this time? This is an issue across the health sector whereby the State is outsourcing healthcare, and where the Government is not doing enough to prevent long waiting lists and vacancies.
Under the current Act, the statutory timeline for an assessment of need is six months. In the HSE Dublin and Midlands area, there were more than 6,500 children overdue completed assessment of need reports. Nationally, the figure is over 20,000. Figures from the HSE also show that 8,200 children were waiting for their first contact from the CDNT at the end of March 2026. More than 5,260 are waiting over 12 months. The regional healthcare area of HSE Dublin and Midlands, which includes my county of Kildare, has the highest waiting list for first contact with a CDNT, and nearly 1,700 children have been waiting for over a year.
We in the Labour Party have raised concerns regarding continued attempts by Departments to pass the buck. When the Minister previously announced the replacement of the existing assessment of need process with a new system, we in the Labour Party raised concerns as the proposals were to replace the requirement of a formal diagnosis when determining access to a special class and special school.
This, as my colleague, Deputy Eoghan Kenny, stated, is a serious development. Such proposals will have profound implications for school teachers and, most importantly, for the children and families who urgently require timely access to specialist support. By replacing diagnostic criteria with an educational assessment, the Government is placing an unreasonable and unsafe burden on school communities.
The Minister has said that children will no longer need an assessment of need to get a school place and that it will be up to education to allocate places. I presume that reference was to the Department of education. Unfortunately this is not happening for those who require a special school place, as I found out recently in my constituency of Kildare South. For so many parents right now, an assessment of need is one of the criteria for the allocation of a special school place. Some of the families I am dealing with are waiting on an updated assessment of need as the one they have for their child is a number of years old. The problem they have is that their child is now older, the disabilities and medical conditions remain the same or, unfortunately, have increased but they are waiting on an updated assessment of need or an interim report to try to secure a special school place for their loved one. Time is, unfortunately, against them.
I am sure the Minister is aware of statements made by the INTO calling this a profound breach of trust, a sentiment we in the Labour Party continue to echo. The Taoiseach even said that assessment teams would be carrying out such work. I ask the Minister to clarify which assessment teams will actually end up doing this work. This situation is leaving parents with two parallel pathways, with one to get the therapies the child needs and another to get a diagnosis and a school place for the child. The Government's solution is to place more pressure on teachers who are already, as we all know, stretched to their limit. They cannot be expected to pick up the slack from Departments and they cannot take the responsibility for the failure in addressing the huge waiting times. It is a system not based on lived reality.
Only recently my Labour Party colleague, Councillor Ali Field, brought a petition to the European Parliament to fight the case of her family and other families regarding the long waits for an assessment of need. At that time she said:
My son James who has severe autism and is totally nonverbal has been failed by our state on so many levels. James was deprived of essential early intervention help while he was left waiting on a list for almost two years for an Assessment of Needs and diagnosis.
I have been banging this drum for many years now, as have so many parents and advocates. But our government are not listening. They do not seem to realise that they have a duty of care to all children including the children with the highest support needs.
Another mother who signed the petition, Vivienne Sullivan from Kildare, said:
My son Isaac was on the AON list from 2017 to 2025. His file was lost twice, and on another occasion, he was recorded as having been seen when he had not.
We rang weekly and, in the end, daily. Often the phone was unanswered. He finally had an assessment in March 2025, but he still has no access to services. Isaac is 14 now and has been waiting since he was 5. It's not acceptable.
Following this petition I am pleased to see the European Parliament Committee on Petitions has sought a report from the Department on the Government's continued breach of children's rights. I hope that today the Minister will acknowledge this and provide an update to the House on the publication of the report.
In the Labour Party's alternative budget of 2026 we set out how we would urgently invest in tackling what has happened with the Government and how it has added to the growing waiting lists. The Labour Party would have an initial additional allocation of €15 million under the waiting list initiative to outsource assessments of need for the 5,000 children waiting longest while capacity is built up in the public service. We also need to see urgent action to train more therapists and specialists along with ring-fenced funding to hire future staff. There is also a real question regarding the Government's proposals as to how these new assessment teams will be staffed. Access to an assessment of need has become a major barrier for many families of children with additional needs throughout Ireland. There is an element of short-termism in the Bill as it does nothing to address the long waiting times for assessments of need and does not support timely access to services needed by so many of our children.
I also want to raise concerns about the fact that the Bill will give powers to issue statutory guidelines when the Dáil has not seen sight of those guidelines. As have others, I ask the Minister to confirm the proposed guidelines. What is the timeline for these publications? Has the Minister seen these guidelines? These are critical questions that must be addressed by the Minister and the Department before the House can give any consideration to, or have confidence in, the changes we have been presented with here today. What parents and their children actually need from the Government is a clear and immediate action plan that gets to grips with the growing waiting lists. The workforce challenges in vital services like speech and language, occupational therapy and physiotherapy must all be properly resourced. Children must have access to special schools and school places in their local community. Families need certainty from the Government that their child can access an assessment of need and the services they so desperately need so the constant battle can eventually stop. The Government must give a clear commitment to families on when it will finally comply with its own legal obligation to the assessment of need process under the Disability Act 2025.
I will share another story before I finish, and take young Padraig Creaney from my home town of Athy as an example of the issues and problems I deal with on a daily basis. Padraig got an assessment of need when he was 12 years of age but despite his family continuing to seek a new assessment to cover his additional and, unfortunately, growing needs, it has not been forthcoming for more than 12 years. The family simply does not know where to go next. As it is for the Creaney family in Athy, every day is a fight for these families and their children. They are fighting for basic services. There is a fight for an assessment, a fight for therapies and a fight for a school place. When will the Government finally support these families and actually make a real dent in the waiting times and lists for access to an assessment of need and the vital therapies that the children of this State deserve and have a right to?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-23