Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Brian Stanley (IND), Laois The current situation regarding assessments of need cannot be allowed to continue. It is a national scandal. Children with special needs who are vulnerable cannot even get assessed to get proper services. Some 23,000 assessments of need are overdue, having exceeded the statutory timeline. The average duration it takes to get an assessment of need is 27 months. That is the average. Some people wait up to three years. That is not acceptable. In Laois-Offaly, the figure averages in the region of 900 overdue assessments of need. Laois-Offaly in particular continues to be a blackspot but there are several blackspots in the country. Key to this is the staffing of the HSE. There are not enough clinicians to do the assessments. Getting the assessment is only the first battle in the difficulties for families in Laois-Offaly. The fact is that the CDNTs, in Laois in particular, do not have the required number of staff to provide the therapies and services. That is the real problem. The most recent HSE staffing figures I have are that in network 11, which covers the north of the county, no dedicated occupational therapists have been assigned to date, there are no psychologists and no social workers have been approved. That is network 11. I will move on to network 12 which covers the other two thirds of Laois. Three OT posts and two speech and language posts are vacant and no social workers have been allocated. They are the HSE figures, not mine. People therefore finish up having to pay for assessments of need privately. Many cannot afford to. It works out at between €1,000 and €2,000. Then they have to start paying for occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology and so on. This is putting huge strain on the majority of middle and low-income households. Organisations, such as Laois Offaly Families for Autism, provide support including counselling services and therapies, but they are made up of volunteers. Are we going to load all this on volunteers? These are typically mothers and fathers who have children with special needs and have to raise money to try to provide the services. The legislation brought forward by the Minister could help to speed up the AON process, if it is done correctly, but staffing is the key. Without the staff, the legislation will mean nothing. They are the facts. I am seriously concerned about the power being given to the Minister and the HSE in section 5 to remove applications. It presents a real danger and the Government has not explained this properly. There is real concern about this and it is deemed an opt-out clause. Statutory guidelines are promised as part of the Bill. If they were proper guidelines they would be required but it has already been pointed out that there are guidelines in place. There needs to be consistency with standard procedures and transparency. The assessment of need has to be about establishing what the child's needs are. Early intervention at a crucial stage of a child's development is simply not happening. This is the sad thing about all this in many cases. We know the importance of having timely interventions at the point children are at in their development. What is the update on the 150 additional staff that were promised for CDNTs? In her closing remarks, the Minister of State might give us those figures. They are just to replace the people we are losing from the CDNTs. We need to accelerate that. Will there be enough assessors? I note that 11 clinician guidance teams are promised in the Bill but will be there be enough assessors in place to carry out the assessments of need? That is a key issue that needs to be dealt with. The Government needs to make it a national priority to fill the gaps in the CDNTs properly. In Laois-Offaly and a lot of other counties, but Laois-Offaly is a particular blackspot, that means filling the wide gaps in occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, psychology, social work and other therapies. Anything else is simply window dressing. That is the fundamental point. Resources are needed. Streamline it but do not streamline it in such a way to get people off waiting lists who need to be on them, children who need to be seen, looked after properly and assessed and given the services they require. --- 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