Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West This Bill is a three-card trick. It is dressed up as an effort to help people with disabilities and special needs but it is little more than a press statement in the form of legislation. It costs very little to produce and draft a Bill, but there is a cost to providing services and to providing the professionals needed to be able to deliver those services. The assessment of need system is under enormous strain. More than 20,000 assessments are overdue and more than 90% of children are not receiving an assessment of need within the statutory six-month timeframe. Applications for assessments of need have risen from approximately 4,700 in 2020 to 13,000 last year. Those figures represent thousands of children and families waiting for answers and supports. The parents who want to spend their energy on helping and raising their children are actually spending all of it on trying to get the services they are entitled to and to negotiate the system that is preventing them from getting the help they need. We heard before at the committee on disability that organisations accept the need for reform. They accept that the current system is not working well enough. However, they also raise serious questions about this Bill and the fact it does not address the root causes of this problem. One concern that has been raised repeatedly is that the problem is not simply the assessment process itself but, rather, capacity. Organisations repeatedly pointed to shortages of psychologists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and other professionals across the disability sector. They described a system which demanded continuous growth in resources but is not being provided for. During that committee, it was noted that a disability team which originally supported about 121 children with eight staff members was later supporting 628 children with only an additional six staff members. The result was that waiting lists went back years rather than weeks. I want to reference the work of Cara Darmody, who has been hailed, and rightly so, in this Dáil as a young girl who has probably done more on the whole issue of assessments of need than any TD here. TDs are so fast to get their photographs taken with her but they are not listening to her and that is the key issue. One of her recent proposals was that to fill the gap of professionals and staff needed, it would be logical to try to contract in those resources privately to deliver that work. She made that request to the Tánaiste at least six months ago and made it again recently. I am a great believer in public services but you also need common sense and cop-on. If there are private staff available here or in Britain, they should be used to bring down the current waiting lists. The evidence points overwhelmingly to a shortage of staff and this Bill will not change that. It changes procedures but it does not change capacity. It does not increase the staffing levels or create an additional entitlement to supports once an assessment has been completed. This is a significant limitation - a life-changing limitation, in reality. I am also concerned by the introduction of a preliminary determination of disability before full assessments of need take place. Many people simply see this as a trick by the Government to reduce the waiting lists in the future. Assessments of need should be focused primarily on understanding the child's needs and identifying appropriate supports. Care must be taken to ensure additional procedural steps do not create further obstacles for families already navigating complex systems. Careful scrutiny is required regarding the provisions that allow applications to be deemed withdrawn and closed. There will also need to be a process is needed to deal with circumstances where a case can no longer progress. Legislation must also recognise practical circumstances such as communication failures, changes in contact details and family circumstances and simple administrative errors. Strong safeguards are essential. Another issue that must not be overlooked is what happens after an assessment has been completed. The Disability Act provides a right to an assessment but it does not provide a corresponding right to receive the supports identified during that assessment. For families, that distinction is critical. Receiving confirmation of a need is important but having that need met is what truly matters. The Bill also gives considerable weight to future guidelines. Greater consistency across the country is a worthwhile objective, but people with disabilities, families and representative organisations should have a meaningful role in shaping the guidelines that will ultimately influence how assessments are conducted and how eligibility is interpreted. Ultimately, legislation must be judged by outcomes. If waiting lists remain at current levels, children continue to wait for years for assessment and supports remain unavailable after needs have been identified, families will see little practical benefits from procedural reform alone. Reform is necessary, consistency is necessary and clarity is necessary but, most of all, capacity is necessary. Until those reforms are matched by investment in staff, services and supports, we risk changing the process without changing the experience of the child and the families who depend upon it. --- 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