Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Michael Collins (II), Cork South-West Independent Ireland will support measures that generally speed up assessments for children with disabilities. However, let us be very clear that speeding up paperwork is not the same as speeding up care. I have repeatedly raised the waiting times for assessment of need. Families are waiting far beyond what is acceptable. Parents are exhausted, fighting the system while vital years in their children's development are passing by. These are not statistics; these are families. I know of a five-year-old child referred for an assessment of need on 29 May 2026. The family was later told that the child was being placed on a waiting list for a private provider and that this could take another seven months. Families are being told about timelines, stages and processes. What they want is an assessment and the help that their child needs. Another young man from Bandon was referred for an assessment of need when he was four years old. He is now 12 and still waiting. His family moved address within the same area and informed the HSE but his assessment was never followed up. How can we possibly defend that? Another 11-year-old boy waited 18 months to be seen by the west Cork children's disability network. He was then told he did not meet the criteria and was referred to the primary care for speech and language therapy, and psychology. After waiting 18 months he was simply moved from one waiting list to another. That is not a joined-up disability service. This problem does not end with children. A 47-year-old woman with an intellectual disability has been waiting for two years for a place with CoAction Skibbereen. She is at home for 24 hours a day with her elderly father without the stimulation and socialising she needs. She has been assessed as suitable for the service but still has no place. She should not be facing another winter sitting at home simply because the services are not available. We also deal every year with parents desperately trying to find special class places for children with autism. Children reach school-going to age without their families knowing whether their child will have an appropriate school place. The same uncertainty happens year after year. That is unacceptable. The same applies with SNAs. Principals across Cork South-West tell me they need greater SNA support. The system must recognise the needs that exist in the classroom. There were also serious problems with this year's summer programme with late planning, portal problems and delayed approvals. Schools need adequate notice so that they can recruit to teachers and SNAs, and properly plan for vulnerable children. One principal in Cork South-West told me about a child who had received additional staffing and had successfully attended the summer programme for the previous two years. This year, the additional staffing was refused. The principal faced a choice of telling the child he could no longer attend or somehow make the programme work. She refused to turn the child away and instead she gave up her own paid role and worked without remuneration so that another staff member would be paid and the programme could operate safely. No principal should have to work for nothing to plug a hole created by the State. Early intervention is supposed to be the cornerstone of our disability services but early intervention is meaningless if a child spends years waiting for an assessment and then joins another queue for speech and language therapy, occupational therapy or psychology. I agree that we should speed up assessments but above all we need to put the staff and services behind those assessments. I have been involved in many of the meetings that have taken place over the past 12 months or so. The problem for children with intellectual disabilities is that they have no voice. If their parents are not strong enough to be the voice for them, they are left out in the cold. I know of a child in Castletownbere who cannot get transport services. That child is currently at home sitting with her dog every day of the week. That is no place for that girl to be. She is an intelligent child. She needs to be respected but she cannot because there are no services. There are no transport services. The whole system is broken from start to the finish. There are 85-, 90- and 95-year-old parents trying to drive children for intellectual disabilities services which sometimes are not there. Even if they are there, the elderly parents are no longer able to do it. They are not getting the help that is needed. A very serious issue that needs to be looked at is the transport service for people with intellectual disabilities. The Before We Die campaign is trying to fight to give their children a right to have a home. Many of them can live independently as we have proved in a project we did in Schull, where there are two children with intellectual disability. --- 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