Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ John McGuinness (FF), Carlow-Kilkenny What every parent wants to know is whether this legislation will deal with the issues and the specific timelines that will be put in place. Will it make the assessment better? Based on this legislation, I cannot tell them. I am happy to support any legislation that will in any way deal with the waiting times for families and the other issues they face in relation to assessments and access to therapists, including occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and physiotherapists but I do not see that in this Bill. Let us not pretend that this Bill is going to fix everything as regards the care of those who need it. It is not. If it is not going to, we have to ask where are the professionals we need to deliver the services, to carry out the assessments and to put in place all of the supports individuals require. There are many other players out there in the delivery of services who are doing it to the best of their ability but whom the Department is not looking at to see if it could learn from them. I will give the example of SOS Kilkenny. The principal individual there is Francis Coughlan. He has put forward his budgets year in and year out. He has been left short. He is trying to innovate and move the services on within the community. He is trying to support the families. It is an excellent organisation. Every single year, however, he, the families he represents and the individuals for whom he provides the services are being challenged by the State in terms of the delivery of the services that they need. It is the State that is letting them down because it is not planning for the professionals to be employed and to be maintained in their jobs. What they need is the pay that will keep them there and the structure that will allow them to work freely within the HSE or any other organisation. They are not getting that. That is, perhaps, why they are leaving the country and going elsewhere. I can point the Minister of State to St. Patrick's special school, which is again delivering services way beyond what it should be doing and way beyond what it is being paid for doing. It is not being acknowledged. I encourage the Minister of State to visit the likes of those services and to go Jonah Special School in Slieverue and see what they are trying to do with limited resources, and very successfully doing it, but they require the State to intervene to support them and give them money to develop a modern state-of-the-art service housed in buildings that can accommodate the needs of those children. We are not learning from those at the coalface who are doing this for individual children. Kingsriver Community in my constituency is another project that is doing fantastic work. It is being treated very badly by the HSE. There is no planning in terms of the financing of capital programmes or the financing of the services that they are delivering. The staff are giving more and more of their time - they are not being paid for it - just to make sure their services are being delivered to the clients they have. How bad is that in terms of the reflection on the State? It is absolutely scandalous. The CDNTs, CAMHS and all those organisations that children get referred to are under enormous pressure. As a result of that, children and families are being pushed from pillar to post. They are not getting the type of assessment that is required or the supports that are needed in a structure that is heavily bureaucratic and is interested in nothing other than fulfilling a timeframe or a limited scope in terms of the treatment of all these cases. Neither do I see a plan in place to look after children as they go through their teenage years and become young adults and to support the families in question. What is going to happen when parents die and move on? What is going to happen to those children? What plan is in place to look after them? Where are the services that are defined that they will need? They are not there. As I worked with the Down's syndrome organisation in Kilkenny, I have seen where they too cannot get services from the HSE. When they get their funding, however, which the Minister of State kindly assisted them with, they are able to buy the services privately. It is the bureaucratic nature or set-up the HSE that causes people to look beyond that service. They can deliver a more streamlined service without the hindrance of the reporting mechanisms that are all there. We should not try to hide the fact that we are failing children and forcing them and their families into the courts. We should not be doing that. Every single cent of funding should go directly to organisations that are successfully delivering the type of therapies and support services that are needed, not just for the individual concerned but for the family also. I have heard these debates over and over again and there are no results. I am deeply disappointed with the system and that there is not more in this Bill. --- 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