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

Richard O'Donoghue (II), Limerick County

We can pass whatever legislation we like in this Dáil but first we need to have the people to carry out the assessments to support the legislation we are putting through. We are able to bring in all this different legislation but we are not able to follow through on it, which is disappointing. We have the housing crisis. Students are qualifying in different fields within medicine and then have to leave the country because they see no future here. It is down to supply and demand. We have fantastic skilled workers here in various different fields.
I spoke to a woman last week who had completed her qualifications and was going into the health service. She has done four years and was about to do a further year in the area she wanted to cover. She looked at it on the basis of how much it was going to cost her even though she was trying to further her education to help people. She decided she had enough and was going to head off. I met her parents who were devastated that she had to leave the country. This is a young person aged 24, not long out of college and she wanted to further her education. She said to me that she had no future in Ireland. She said, "I want to stay near my family. I want to work within disability. I have no future. My only future is to leave this country."
We have inflation issues, over taxation of people who are working and over taxation of fuel for cars which are necessary for people to go to work.
Every young person who wants to stay here is given no option but to leave. Who is going to suffer only the people on the waiting lists and the people from disability sectors who need help? That, to me, it is a failure for the Government not to see it has to make sure everyone in this country who wants to stay here is given the right to do so and can see a future and raise a family here, if they so wish. Looking at the statistics, the age of couples who want to settle down to have a family, compared to one decade back, has changed and gone forward ten years. I know people who are settling down at 35, 36 or 37. I was married at 26. That is the difference today. Even those couples who do not want to get married are not settling down until closer to their forties and possibly having only one child.
When we go forward two or three decades from now, we will be looking for people to look after us, but they will not be there. What are we doing? We are driving them out of this country because we are not putting in the proper supports for them so they can care for others. That is the sad thing about this. We can make legislation, but it is only a piece of paper. It is no good unless you can actually put the proper infrastructure behind it to make sure it happens. The infrastructure in this case is to give all the young people qualifying in this country the opportunity to stay here. We have to keep them here. This has to come through not just in the disability or health sectors but also in the housing sector and ensure there is viability so that they can see a future. If you cannot achieve that, you will not achieve anything.
We are going to have to work together. I ask the Government to listen to reason. The budget is coming up. It could do one thing in this budget to help everyone in this country and give them a small piece to ensure they have some bit of money left in their pockets at the end of the week. I have said already and will say again that there is only one piece Government has got to do that will have a knock-on effect across everything, and that is a cap on the taxation of fuel in this country. Fuel can keep rising but increasing the fuel cost and increasing the taxes on people we want to keep here will drive them out of the country all the time.
On the other side of that, you have people protesting. People in this country cannot afford to protest and do not want to protest. They are not going out and jumping up and down just for the sake of it; they see no other option. They are not criminals and they should not be put down as that. They are people who see no other option and they are standing up for people from the disability sector, the vulnerable and children. They stand up for all those sectors. The Government has a chance in this budget to give a small lifeline to people to make sure we can hold them in this country.

---

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