Disability (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Gillian Toole (IND), Meath East I will start echoing the sentiment Forest E. Witcraft, who said, 100 years from now it will not matter what his bank account was, the car he drove or what house he lived in, but what will matter is the difference that he made in the life of a child. That is integral to what we are discussing here, namely, meeting the needs and embedding rights into our legislation. I will try to confine my comments to this amendment to the 2005 Act. This came about from a 2023 report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. It recommended that Ireland should review the relevant legislation, including disability legislation, the EPSEN Act and Equality Acts to bring them in line with a human rights-based approach to disability. I am aware that the six-month right is enshrined. That is not changing; it is its delivery and pivotal to that is reducing waiting times and urgently addressing staff shortages. I acknowledge the initiatives to extend the third level placements for occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and educational psychologists. I would also like to commend Dunboyne College of Further Education, which runs gateway courses for speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. I have actually linked Catherine Fox, the principal, with the HSE and the school of nursing in Maynooth. They have that memorandum of understanding already. There are things that can be done proactively. If we go back to the rights piece, however, that is effectively what we are dealing with here. Next month, I think, Professor Noel Purdy and the inclusive education task force that has been convened will begin their work in earnest. They have a six-month timeframe to work through. That is dealing with the review and the implementation and the action plans from the review of the EPSEN Act. Again, that is feeding into the delivery of services. I do not for one minute deny the fact that recruitment is key to all of this. In terms of the committee deliberations, I thank the secretariat, the Library and Research Service, the individual parents who wrote into the committee and the 16 different stakeholder groups who put a huge amount of time and effort into the submissions to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Disability Matters. The Minister of State has the report from the committee and its recommendations, particularly the cross-cutting recommendations. In particular, I raise recommendation No. 26 on page 20. Key to that is the recruitment piece and again, every possible opportunity to recruit from abroad to retain the graduates that we train here. Perhaps there is a contractual piece that can be done there whereby we prioritise our graduates to come back after they have travelled abroad. There is another key piece in the report in relation to recommendation No. 29. It calls for a review of the legislation 12 months from commencement, as well as a further review within 24 months. That is pivotal. Areas that were of concern to me included, I have to admit, section 4 regarding the deemed withdrawal but I am pleased to hear and to read of the reinstatement and the fact that families can reapply within 12 months. That was an area of concern but I am pleased to see that it is proposed to be addressed. In relation to section 6, the Ombudsman for Children's Office had raised concerns. We discussed them at the committee, as well as the statutory guidelines. They are also very welcome. Last week, I met the Meath disability services team manager and we went through recruitment. We have identified the shortfall in places for OTs, speech and language therapy and child psychology in the Trim area CDNT. That is having a serious knock-on effect. I suggested to her, as I have done with the Minister of State previously, that waiting list initiatives should include access to integrative therapies relating to all the things we included in our inclusive education report, namely art therapy, drama, equine therapy, music, nurture rooms, sensory rooms. We can meet some of the needs of children while the families wait by being creative and by complying with legislation. The Department did it this summer with the alternative respite funding that was made available. I ask that where, in the context of children who are not in special classes or special schools, if a teacher or an early years educator identifies a need - they are professionals after all - the Department should take their word for it and expand the wait list initiative and alternative respite funding. That will allow us to hit the ground running. There is an excellent service, Ability Equine Assisted Therapy, in north Meath. It is at risk of being wound up. It is a charity and everything is above board, but those involved are so busy trying to meet the needs of families in north Meath that have children who may have regulation or behavioural issues or occupational therapy issues. There are good people doing good work, and we need to be creative with the framework to support them. --- 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