Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23
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Claire Kerrane (SF), Roscommon-Galway

I hope the Minister of State has listened very carefully to the many speakers in this House. I have sat in for most of the debate and I think it is clear from Members of the Opposition, as well as her own party and Government backbenchers, that this Bill does not actually deal with the nub of the issue. If the issue in terms of assessments of need was that we have far too many children on the waiting list who do not actually need to be on the waiting list and we need to remove them from the waiting list, then this Bill might be in some way useful. That is not the issue, however. Time and again, the actual issue is raised. The issue is that we do not have the workforce or the therapists to meet the needs that are there in terms of children that need supports. The only question that we should be answering in terms of any legislation - whether legislation is actually needed or not in the first place - is how do we get children who have additional needs the support that they need when they need it, which is now, how do we access those children and how do we ensure the easiest way for them to receive the supports. As my colleague, Deputy Ó Murchú, has said many times, at this stage it probably is the schools. It probably is having the therapies in the school setting and the supports and the services actually going to the children, rather than the other way around.
In Roscommon and Galway, the people whom I represent, are in no way different to many parts of the State; in fact, every single county in the state. We have had a situation in Galway in particular where the number of overdue assessments of need has more than doubled. The average wait time now is 24 months, that is, two years. Looking at the data for quarter 1 of this year, four assessments of need were completed in Galway and eight were completed in that same period in County Roscommon.
There are questions that have been raised here in terms of the guidelines and what those guidelines will look like, as well as assessment officers, who they will be, what their backgrounds will be and whether they will have any clinical expertise. Those questions need to be answered and they should really be answered in legislation like this or at least in this House. For a lot of people out there, this is just going to look like another layer. It is another layer on another layer. We are talking about 11 in-reach teams when we cannot staff our CDNTs in many parts of the country, we cannot staff or retain our primary care therapists, and now we are going to have another layer of more therapists when, in reality, those therapists are not there. That is the nub of the issue and I do not believe that this Bill will deal with the actual issue, which is workforce. That is really concerning.
Issues have been raised in terms of therapists coming home. More can be done on that, particularly those who are educated and receive their professional degrees in England, for example. There have been difficulties in that regard. For parents looking in, however, it is one issue after the other. It is the school place, the SNA, and July provision. As for dental checks, when I was in school, you got two or three dental checks but now a child is lucky to get one. We are going backwards in terms of basic supports and services for children. Again, I come back to the primary question, namely, how do we get children with additional needs the supports that they need when they need them? I do not believe, unfortunately, that this Bill is going to do that.

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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