Hospital Services
Dail Éireann — 2021-07-13
============================================================

Stephen Donnelly (FF), Wicklow

I wish to make clear that there are two different times. One is for assessment, which is the six to eight weeks, but the other, critically - and this might be the situation for the family the Deputy is involved with - is the waiting time for therapy, which is five months. Having looked at this, I do not believe that this is an acceptable amount of time for a child to wait when it is therapeutic intervention in the case of sexual assault. I have instructed the Department to work directly with the HSE to find ways to quickly bring that five-month period down.
The Deputy referred to a delay in sending waiting information. I will come to that in my final reply.

---

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/2021-07-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-07-13