Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West This Bill sums up everything that is wrong with the Government's approach to disability services in this country. We have a crisis, with families crying out for help, and here we have a Bill that is not about investing in the health and education professionals needed to operate a properly functioning system. The Bill is not about addressing that in Chamber House CDNT, where well over 1,000 files simply have not been opened, there is a vacancy rate of more than 50% in some professions and a rate of one third across the board. In Tymon CDNT, also in my constituency, the situation is similar. This Bill is not about providing resources. Instead, it is about looking for shortcuts. Rather than putting the resources in place to meet the goals, it is about shifting the goalposts. The Government has been under massive pressure on this issue. That is a testament to all the campaigners, parents and families who fought for years to put it on the agenda. Cara Darmody has been outside Leinster House again and again. The campaigners have demanded action on assessment of need and provision of the therapies that must flow from that. The Government is feeling the pressure. At the end of June, 23,000 assessments of need were overdue, with assessment taking an average of two years and two months to complete. That has created a problem for the Government. One of the good things in the law is that assessment of need must take place within six months. That is clear. When people come to me looking for support for their children, the first question I ask is whether they have applied for an assessment of need and, if so, how long they have been waiting. If it is more than six months, the advice we give them is obvious and, I presume, is the same as that given by lots of other TDs. We tell them they should ask a solicitor to assist them to take the State to court. Obviously, it is ridiculous that people must do that. Of course, once the assessment of need is done, children just move onto other waiting lists for necessary therapies. Unfortunately, there is no legal right in terms of timeframes for access to therapy. The Government has a problem with the law that requires an assessment of need to happen within six months. Instead of the State's approach being to provide the resources to ensure people get an assessment of need within the timeframe and that the State stops breaking its own law, what we are seeing, in effect, are attempts to water down the law to reduce the legal liability on the State. In reality, we should be expanding that liability by introducing timeframes in respect of therapies as well as for assessments of need. Instead, the Government would like to water down its liability. The pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill by the committee reported that any reforms to the AON process should not restrict access for children and families and should provide clear and robust procedural safeguards. Witnesses warned that if the legislation resulted in a higher threshold for determining disability before a fuller assessment of need can be carried out, children with complex, fluctuating or less visible needs could be screened out of having those needs assessed at all. It seems none of those concerns has been heeded in the Bill. What we are getting is a new system that will enable the HSE to unilaterally withdraw assessment of need applications without seeking parents' consent. The conditions under which the HSE can do this are not specified in the Bill. Instead, section 5 provides that this will be worked out in ministerial regulations. That means we will not get a chance to debate, amend or vote on them in the Dáil. It is fundamentally undemocratic. We are expected to take the Minister's word for it that the conditions for withdrawing parents' applications will be fair and reasonable and that the HSE's desire to cut waiting lists will not be a factor. We have seen this previously with other waiting lists, such as for social housing, with people arbitrarily bumped off the list because the State claimed their needs had been met through the housing assistance payment, HAP, or there was no response to a letter. The power of the HSE to withdraw applications and bump applicants off waiting lists is all the more worrying because there is no requirement first to get parents' consent. The withdrawal is to happen instantly once the HSE decides to issue a withdrawal notice. The parents can challenge it and request a reinstatement but the application will only be reinstated from the date of that request and will not include the time between the notice being issued and the reinstatement request. That could encourage further massaging of waiting lists. What happens if the parents do not get the withdrawal notice because they have moved house? What happens if they have been made homeless? Many parents are going to be in that situation. They will get 12 months to request reinstatement but with the process currently taking two years and two months, lots of parents will not realise they have been taken off the list. What the Government is trying to do with this Bill is extremely concerning. It should invest in providing assessments and services rather than trying to fiddle the figures like this. --- 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