Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Martin Daly (FF), Roscommon-Galway I thank the Chair for giving me time to speak on what is an important amendment to the Disability Act. I welcome the amendment to the Disability Act on its narrow basis, which is to streamline the assessment of need process and ensure that assessments of need are not used as a barrier to accessing services. It is clear that the statutory guidelines will be changed, which will standardise the assessment of needs process nationally and provide consistency throughout the country. That is to be welcomed. It is also to be welcomed that the assessments of need will not be used as a barrier to therapies within the HSE or access to special education in future and that there will be other pathways for children who have special and additional needs to have access to those therapies and assessments. I welcome the 11 new in-reach teams which will include an occupational therapist, speech therapist, psychologist and an administrator to help professionals within the service to carry out these assessments that will allow children to access therapies in a timely way. The Minister and Minister of State have brought considerable focus to trying to streamline access to services like the single point of contact with the HSE. Clinicians and professionals in the community will be able to refer to a single point in the HSE. That decision on whether children are to be seen by primary care, CAMHS or a CDNT will be made in-house and not be sent back to a general practitioner to reapply for that service. The advent of the autism assessment intervention pathways is also to be welcomed and will hopefully take away some of the pressure on the assessment of needs requirement. All of those are welcome developments and the changes that are proposed under this amendment are also welcome. I have to put this into context as well. I am aware of the focus that has been brought by having the disability unit in the Department of the Taoiseach and of the increased funding of €3.8 billion this year which came with that. However, it is incumbent on the Government and the Department to ensure that these changes are not perceived to be in some way reducing waiting lists and creating a false narrative around the access to therapy. It is true that we do not have the capacity that we require under all the different services, whether CDNTs, primary care, CAMHS or special education in schools, and that we do not have the capacity to deal with all the young people who require those therapies and interventions. It is really important that the Government recommits to ensuring that the required professionals, both in the community and in the different organisations, are recruited and retained within the system in order to provide these services. If you are telling someone that there is no longer a barrier of having to have an assessment of need in order to gain access to various therapies in circumstances where people can directly access those therapies but where there are no therapists available to provide them, then the Bill will mean nothing. It is important to point out that the delivery of special classes throughout the country has improved. However, there are companies which provide modular school buildings and which have good records in doing so but which are finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the building unit in the Department of education when it comes to the provision of schools and special classrooms. I need to put that on the record. We need to streamline our procurement processes to make it easier and to provide more competition within the sector to provide this necessary infrastructure. I will give an example. We have three building companies, modular companies, who have an agrément from the NCAI, which allows them to build these schools. They have track records on that. One of them in particular is precluded from a framework within the Department of education and that is something that is to be regretted. I am going to come back to personal stories. I received a letter from a paediatrician yesterday who referred a young person who has generalised anxiety to the local CAMHS service in County Galway. That paediatrician received a letter back without the CAMHS service seeing that adolescent and essentially pointed them in a different direction, to counselling services in the community and other such things. That consultant paediatrician had made a clinical assessment of that adolescent and had felt that the young boy deserved an assessment by a CAMHS team but was simply rebuffed by another part of the service. I met a young mother the other day who has an 11-year-old young person with autism and has had a very difficult time in gaining access to services. There is a lack of communication between primary care, CDNT and CAMHS and the only people who suffer in this regard are the children and the parents who are involved. --- 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