Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23
============================================================

Mark Ward (SF), Dublin Mid-West

Parents being left waiting for assessments of need for their children is a huge issue in my area. To me, what the Government is trying to do here today is typical smoke and mirrors. It is going back to its usual three-card trick by moving children from list to list without them getting the proper therapies that they need at the end of it. I represent the same constituency as the Minister of State with special responsibility for disability, Deputy Emer Higgins. We both represent children who are a waiting list for assessments of need. In our area, as we speak today, over 2,000 children have been waiting for more than six months for an assessment of need. The Government is breaking the law by not providing these assessments under the Disability Act 2005. Last year, instead of providing resources for therapies, the Government spent €7.2 million fighting these desperate parents in court. These are parents who just want their children to reach their full potential. There is no greater crime than this.
In our area of Palmerstown, 154 children are waiting for an appointment with a physiotherapist. Will the Minister guess how many of these children have been waiting for more than a year for appointments? The answer is that every one of them. This Bill that we are speaking about today does not provide for one additional physiotherapist. In the children's disability network team, CDNT, in Rossecourt, which serves Adamstown, Lucan and Balgaddy, we have only 43% of the number of psychologists that we need in our area. The Clondalkin CDNT is housed in a lovely, brand-new building.
There is no point in having a brand-new building if we do not have the staff to provide therapies there. We have no occupational therapist and no speech and language therapist, and this Bill does not make provision for those posts. I cannot see anything in it that will help the parents who contact me desperately trying to get the therapies their children need in a timely manner. The Government really needs to buck up its ideas and get this sorted.

---

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/2026-09-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-23