Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Albert Dolan (FF), Galway East I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. Supporting people with disabilities and their families is a priority, particularly for me as a TD for Galway East, to ensure the people of Galway East receive the services they deserve. I want to see a system that supports their needs close to home and gives families confidence for the future. I start by acknowledging the work Government has been doing. It provided €20 million this year for the assessment of need targeted wait list initiative, the development of therapy services in special schools and the work to recruit additional clinicians. All of this is to be welcomed and encouraged. It is a case of building on that. With those measures, we have to be honest about where we are. As of the end of June, more than 23,000 assessment applications were overdue. Behind every one of those applications is a person waiting and a family trying to understand what help is available and when it will arrive. For a parents watching their child struggle, being told the system is under pressure offers very little reassurance. They know that early intervention matters. They need to see that urgency reflected by the system. This Bill proposes practical changes to make the assessment process more consistent and more focused on a child's needs. I support that direction. Where an appropriate assessment can establish the support a child requires, we should avoid unnecessary duplication that takes clinicians away from providing therapy. I also welcome the retention of the statutory right to apply for an assessment and the existing six-month statutory timeframe. Those protections matter and families must have confidence that reform will strengthen the system. The provisions for closing and reinstating applications must be handled sensitively. A family overwhelmed by caring responsibilities may struggle to respond to correspondence and they need to be given the time to address and deal with it. They must receive clear communication and meaningful support before an application is deemed withdrawn. We must also remember that completing an assessment does not in itself provide a child with therapy. Families need access to speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and the other supports identified. Children who need help must be directed towards appropriate services even when they do not meet the statutory definition of a disability. Our responsibility continues into adulthood. People need suitable day services, respite and residential supports with genuine choices about how and where they live. Families need confidence that those supports will be there as the circumstances of the family change. I was over the moon last year when I saw that the ring-fenced disability capital budget was going up by €15 million to a total of €43 million. I ask the Minister of State to go back to her Department and get absolute clarity about how that money has been spent this year to date. What capital projects have been delivered in disability this year? Where has the money been consumed that was ring-fenced for capital budgets? Has it all been consumed by detailed design and tender stages and planning, or have we actually delivered tangible disability projects? I work closely with Corlann, formerly Brothers of Charity, and also Ability West in Galway. They are legacy organisations. They have sites and they have space. Does the Minister of State know what they do not have? They have a huge service-level agreement with the HSE on how to deliver services and they obviously have their negotiations about funding, but they have no provision for capital funding to build the homes themselves that they could staff, man and where they could provide the respite support and the residential care. They then end up taking on more residential units and paying huge rents. Those end up being commercial leases. The people who go into residential care under the commercial lease, and Corlann and Ability West, do not get the same protections as a normal tenant would in a residential dwelling. As a result the organisations that this State is funding are subjected to crazy rent increases. One could not imagine how much residential care homes rents' to landlords, because they are not protected the way a residential lease is, but are under a commercial lease. If the €43 million in the disability capital budget has been primarily consumed by lengthy planning applications, tender stages and detailed designs but no real delivery, maybe it is time to change the way we do it. In the forthcoming budget, the Government should look at giving a devolved grant to the disability organisations around the country for capital projects exactly the way it works with education. One could say to Corlann or Ability West that we will give them €2 million this year and they can deliver the services. It is like sports capital. When you give it to an organisation with this modus operandi and drive, it will do an incredible job at delivering 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