I propose to take Questions Nos. 17 to 33, inclusive, together.

The Cabinet committee on disability has been established to oversee the implementation of programme for Government commitments in the area of disability, with specific focus on children's disability services, as well as disability more generally under the Government' s new national human rights strategy for disabled people for 2025 to 2030.

Under the programme for Government, we are committed to delivering a step change in disability services and to advancing the rights and improving the lives of people with disabilities. To deliver on this, I established a stand-alone Cabinet committee on disability. This committee has met eight times to date, most recently on 27 April and it is due to meet again shortly. To date, the committee has considered issues, including the new national human rights strategy for disabled people, the provision of therapists in special schools, improving the delivery of services and reform of the assessment of need process.

Despite the committed efforts of so many working to provide services, and significant increases in funding and resources in recent years, we acknowledge that we can and have to do better and do more.

Reflecting the importance of disability issues, I have established a dedicated disability unit in my Department. An initial programme plan for the unit has been published, outlining the work of the unit, including its role supporting the Cabinet committee on disability and ensuring a truly all-of-government approach to disability, as set out in the new national disability strategy. The Government's new National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People 2025-2030 was published in September 2025. That is the framework for the whole-of-government approach to addressing disability. It represents our commitment and ambition that all disabled people in Ireland can live the life of their choosing and participate in their communities and our society to the fullest extent possible.

In budget 2026, we have taken initial steps to deliver on this commitment, with a strong focus on investment in both specialist disability services and mainstream services. A record €3.8 billion allocation to the Department of Children, Disability and Equality for specialist disability services represents a 20% increase in funding for disability services, which will improve both sustainability of the sector and delivery of residential, respite and therapy services for children and adults. The disabilities workforce is growing year on year, and budget 2026 will allow for further targeted expansion in the workforce across key services. Funding has been allocated for an additional 945 whole-time equivalents, which will bring the disability workforce to almost 23,600 by the end of this year.

Special education also saw record investment under budget 2026, totalling €3 billion, which will see an additional 860 special education teachers, SETs, appointed along with more than 1,700 additional special needs assistants, SNAs. A national therapy service in education has been established, commencing in special schools and subsequently extending gradually to schools with special classes and mainstream provision. As announced by the Minister for Education and Youth, Deputy Naughton, in early February this year, the first 45 special schools to benefit from this service have been selected and are based in clusters in counties Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kildare, Kilkenny, Louth, Laois, Limerick, Longford, Meath, Monaghan, Tipperary, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow. Further roll-out of the service will occur on a phased basis with a wider roll-out to special schools commencing in the 2026-27 school year.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House

It is planned that this service will be extended to special classes and mainstream classes following the roll-out to special schools. Initially the service will include occupational therapy and speech and language therapy services. Over time further disciplines such as physiotherapy may be included. A recruitment campaign for senior and staff grade occupational therapists and speech and language therapists has recently taken place to support the 45 schools in the initial phase. Posts are currently being offered and it is expected that the first therapists will be in post very shortly. In all, we expect there will be almost 290 staff supporting the overall education therapy service. This service is not a replacement for existing services; rather, it will work in an integrated and complementary way with existing services, recognising that special schools support children with complex needs.

Other initiatives to support a whole-of-government approach to disability include increased investment in housing adaptation grants and in the public transport retrofit programme, along with enhanced supports for employers for the employment of disabled people. In addition, budget 2026 also contained targeted and mainstream social protection measures which will support households with disabilities, including increases in weekly rates, expansion of eligibility to schemes and amendments to income disregards for carers. Budget 2026 is a first step in the Government's ambition to deliver the National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled People 2025-2030. I believe we have made a strong start in year one of our programme of work and investment. I am determined that this will be a government that moves forward with purpose, in improving the level and scale of support for disabled people and their families.

I am aware of the Taoiseach's commitment to the matter of disability and the establishment of the unit in his Department, and the Minister, Deputy Norma Foley's, commitment to improving the lot of people who live with disability in Ireland. We have met groups of parents whose main concern and apprehension is the care of their vulnerable offspring when they are not around anymore, either through incapacity or death, which happens to us all eventually, and the expectation that their siblings will take on that care without negotiation and without any hope or respite in planning for their accommodation as they get older, whether it is in full residential care, supervised care or in community and local authority housing that is is suitably supported.

My question is fairly straightforward. We understand the pressures that disability services are under right across the country. They are more acutely felt in certain regions and there are black spots around the country that have been well-documented in many of our clinics. There is a particularly acute problem with therapies in Cork, as the Taoiseach is well aware. A post for disability clinical lead for the country was advertised a number of months ago. My understanding is a number of people were interviewed, but the post was not filled. They were not deemed to be satisfactory, which is fine, but this post has been left unfilled for a number of month. When will that post be readvertised? It needs to be filled urgently.

I appreciate the Taoiseach's Department's ongoing work on disability. One aspect that is often overlooked is funding to support local authorities to have disability access officers and funding to back up their work by making accessibility a default and improving the quality of life for many people, including their access to towns and villages. I would like to see dedicated funding for those people.

Tomorrow, there is another protest by Northside Home Care Services workers who have been engaging in a series of one-day protests and strikes over the fact that they did not benefit from the pay increases arising from the section 39 Workplace Relations Commission decision on pay restoration. Many of these workers used to be paid on a par with HSE workers. Now, they are on rates barely above the minimum wage. There are thousands of them. This is one group of 80. Their shop steward has been disciplined because of their engagement in the process and suspended.

By who?

By the not-for-profit company that provides services to the HSE. I met some of these other workers, doing the same thing. There are thousands of these people, all across the country, on poverty pay rates, who did not get the pay increase that other section 39 workers got. They are very angry and it is not fair. There should not be pay apartheid for home care workers.

I raise the matter of a group of children who are being left behind by this Government. Those are children with mild or moderate learning disabilities and complex needs. Mothers of children with Down's syndrome have written to me to express how abandoned they feel. They say that the Government is intentionally misleading people by talking about special classes when 89% of those classes are designed for children with autism. It is welcome that we are getting autism classes but the Government should be honest about that. When the Government announced in March that it was sanctioning 387 new special classes, only one was a general learning disability class. Of course, it is welcome to have some recognition by the Government of the needs of autistic children and their right to education but children with Down's syndrome have an equal right to education appropriate to their needs. An hour a day of special education support in mainstream does not provide that. Will the Taoiseach raise this? Will the Government commit to opening more general learning disability classes?

I ask the Taoiseach about St. Francis Junior School in Dublin 17. It is a DEIS+ school that is losing a teacher this year. This is based on pupil numbers on 30 September last year. It is just one pupil short. This coming year, it will be over the threshold of pupil numbers, so this cut makes no sense at all. In 2020, in a similar situation, the Minister for Education intervened and a teacher was kept on a one-year fixed-term contract, which solved the school's problems. Will the Taoiseach ask the Minister for Education and Youth to look at this again and intervene?

I raise a new special school that was announced for St. Fergal's in Bray. It was welcome news when this school was announced earlier this year. It will accommodate 18 to 24 students, beginning in September 2026. However, there has been radio silence about the school since. There has been no information for parents about how to apply and whether they will get places. The Taoiseach knows that children need to be prepared to start school in September. Indeed, parents have work to do to get a child ready for school. It is completely unacceptable that there has been no information locally about how parents can apply and whether they will get places in this school. I would appreciate it if the Taoiseach would raise that with the Minister.

Children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in Ireland are still denied access to givinostat, a transformative drug. I understand that the HSE drugs group is to meet tomorrow, 10 June, to consider givinostat for reimbursement. This is after more than a year since it was licensed at European level.

A number of serious criteria need to be met in relation to it, principal among these is that the eligibility criteria would be aligned with the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, NICE, approach ensuring access for boys who can walk or who can stand with or without support to ensure Irish boys are not treated differently from their British or European counterparts.

I wish to raise St. Anne's Special School in the Curragh, County Kildare. It has been waiting ten years for a new school building. The project remains at stage 2b design, and planning permission is due to expire next year. The Taoiseach will appreciate there is very little time for the school to get shovels into the ground and start building. There is only one accessible bathroom for 40 students in the school. More than a dozen children, who are wheelchair users, have no access to inclusive equipment on the grounds at lunchtime or breaks. Due to the current condition of the school, the day-to-day operational costs are now diverting funding from essential educational and sensory equipment. I ask that the Taoiseach follow up with the Minister for education on this important project for St. Anne’s Special School in the Curragh.

I want to raise the Disability (Amendment) Bill. While the Government presents this legislation as reform, the details suggest a significant shift in how children will be able to access assessments and services. The Bill gives authority to an assessment officer to formally determine whether a child has a qualifying disability before a full clinical assessment to the medical needs can begin. This represents a fundamental change. It places the decision on eligibility at the very start of the process rather than allowing clinicians to assess need and determine diagnosis based on examination. It is my understanding that the assessment officers will be administrative officials. They will not have medical practitioner experience or they will not be therapists, yet under these proposal they are being given the central role in deciding whether a child proceeds to a full assessment. Does the Taoiseach agree with AsIAm, the Disability Federation Ireland and Inclusion Ireland which have warned that this could operate as a filtering mechanism, limiting the numbers entering the system, rather than resolving delays?

The Northside Home Care Services workers are on strike again tomorrow. I submitted a parliamentary question two months ago which was followed up by another one because I could not get an answer. It was followed up by another one which eventually revealed that the Northside Home Care employers were invited by the Department’s own agent to apply for the WRC pay agreement only to be excluded afterwards because of the HSE’s procurement model. The workers have fallen into a Government-created loophole.

On my way to the Chamber, I met Emily Felix who is looking for the drug for Friedreich's ataxia. I know the HSE is meeting tomorrow. I would love for that to be examined.

I want to raise the waiting times for therapies for children’s disability network teams. A couple of weeks ago, I raised the unacceptable waiting time for children in Lucan for speech and language therapy. The average is a two-year wait. I thought that was bad until I received a response yesterday about a four-year-old boy from Clondalkin who will be waiting five years before he gets speech and language therapy. Every expert will say that early intervention is key. One of the worst jobs for TDs across this House is when you have to send a response back to a parent. It is really upsetting as a TD but that pales into insignificance compared to what the parent in receipt of that letter experiences when they receive news that their four-year-old child will not get an appointment for speech and language therapy until they are nine years old. What will the Government do about this?

That concludes the contributions. There are just over nine minutes for the Taoiseach to reply to the 12 Deputies.

I thank all the Deputies for raising these very important questions here.

On Deputy Martin Daly’s question, I have also met the group, Before We Die, in relation to vulnerable adult children and the fear and anxiety of parents in terms of providing for them if they were to pass from this world. The Minister for housing has met the Minister of State for disability. The Minister for housing is instructing local authorities to build and to have a quota in every scheme for people with disabilities in the first instance and not do so on the basis that if they get wraparound services, they will build a house. They must just go and build it. We will have to put pressure on the HSE side, on the healthcare side, to make sure there are supports. The local authority will have to work proactively with the families and the health service to make sure the appropriate balance of care is provided. A lot of people with disabilities are in the position to manage so a continuum of care is required here. The last meeting of the disability group discussed this in some considerable detail. Having met the Before We Die group, it was clear the parents were being asked to jump hurdles that were really not appropriate, in my view. We should be more proactive as a State in helping them along this journey to try to provide for their children - particularly on the accommodation side. I met one parent who said her two sons could manage quite well with a bit of support and did not need anything too extraordinary. Others would need far more intensive care in a residential environment.

We also have to get the balance right between decongregation and new provision because if all the resources just go into decongregation, there are no resources for new provision. We have to try to work with all concerned in trying to find a way through this. I am just being honest and open here. The current situation is not sustainable - I am very clear about that. Both Departments are now working together to try to unblock that for the families concerned.

On Deputy Pádraig O’Sullivan’s question, I will have to check. My understanding was that progress was being made in terms of the lead positions. On the national disability lead, I will talk to the Minister in respect of that. I will come back to the Deputy on that.

Deputy McGreehan raised disability access officers. That is a potentially powerful catalyst in every local authority area with the right people recruited who could look at the full range of policies across a local authority from housing to pedestrian access to roads to access to buildings to ensure the entire philosophy of local authorities is imbued with implementing the human-rights based strategy for disabled people. I will revert to the Deputy on where we are on that and the coverage across the country. It is something the Government is interested in expanding.

On Deputy Quaide's contribution, I met Craig Coady yesterday with Deputy Pádraig O’Sullivan. It was a very heartrending meeting. What the family has gone through is quite shocking. I have spoken to the Minister about this. We will do everything we can to accelerate consideration of Skyclarys provision. It was never scheduled for tomorrow but I think Givinostat is. However, we are hoping we can bring forward consideration of Skyclarys by the HSE's drugs group. We have about 200 families who are living with Friedreich's ataxia. I am very conscious of this as is the Minister. For the record of the House, I laid out earlier the information I was provided with in terms of the engagement between the HSE and the company. What is more important now is that we try to get this over the line as quickly as we possibly can in accordance with the procedures and processes that are laid out. Time is running out for many people, not least young Paudie himself who needs this as fast as we possibly can provide it. The Minister is taking other actions as well to make sure that if a positive decision was to emerge in the next number of weeks, we could make sure a green light could be given.

Deputy Boyd Barrett raised the Northside Home Care issue. Obviously, the industrial relations can be quite complex in terms section 39 organisations and WRC agreements. Every decision taken in relation to any one group does not stay with the one group. It has read across to other scenarios as well. I do not know whether that is the core issue here in terms of the nature of Northside Home Care and whether structure of it is the problem in terms of the application of the section 39 resolution of this through the WRC, which took a considerable length of time following the public service pay agreement. Deputy Heneghan also raised this. I will endeavour to engage with the Department of public expenditure on this and with all concerned to see if we can find a way to deal with this.

There are a lot more affected than just those 80 workers.

That is the point. That is what invariably happens with industrial relations so that may be the factor here.

I accept Deputy Paul Murphy's general point. The incidence of autism seems to have grown dramatically. Although some say it is better diagnosed, I am not so sure any more. The numbers are significant in terms of expansion of services in health, but particularly in education. Even this year it has been significant. In the most recent census, in comparison with the previous one, there has been an exponential increase in adults and children declaring a disability. There is a challenge that in the overarching focus on autism, other disabilities perhaps do not get the same attention or focus. General disability special classes are important, such as for Down's syndrome. There are good organisations that advocate for Down's syndrome. The Government works well with them. However, it is something I will raise with the Minister to see whether we have a proper audit of the provision of service and there is a sufficiency of service for those with mild or moderate learning disabilities.

Deputy O'Callaghan raised St. Francis school. It was raised earlier in the Order of Business, presumably by his Sinn Féin constituency colleague. Apparently it went through the independent appeals process. It is one pupil short of the criteria governing the appointment of teachers and the enrolment numbers. I will raise it with the Minister, but the Minister made it clear to the Deputy that the independent appeals process made a decision on it. I do not know whether or not it is a growing population area or there is some manoeuvrability for the decision makers.

Deputy Whitmore raised a new special school for Wicklow. I will have to follow up on that. Is she saying absolutely nothing has happened since then?

They have not heard anything.

They have not heard anything. I will follow up because it is now June. If people want to get enrolled by September something has to happen. I will raise it with the Minister of State, Michael Moynihan and the Minister, Hildegarde Naughton.

Deputy O'Rourke said the meeting to consider the drug for Duchenne is tomorrow. I hope we will get a positive outcome from that and can make progress. There has been a fair degree of representation and advocacy in that regard from both Houses.

Deputy Wall raised St. Anne's special school in the Curragh. That is a new school project. It is at stage 2B. We will engage with the Minister in respect of that. This is a special school that needs to be provided.

Deputy Tóibín heard Deputy Mark Ward and others talking about access to services. The existing system is not working at all. In fact, it is exacerbating the situation. It has meant there are fewer therapists available for services than for assessments. We are trying to get a more common-sense approach to this, so that the preponderance of therapy would be allocated to children in the earlier stages and they would have access to the therapists much earlier than they have currently. We need to do more, look at how therapists are deployed and ask how we can get the maximum outcomes from interventions.

Deputy Heneghan raised the northside home care workers, which I spoke about earlier. I also spoke about Friedreich's ataxia. I will come back to him about the home care workers; I think I have already outlined to Deputy Quaide and other Deputies the situation with Friedreich's ataxia.

Deputy Ward raised waiting times for disabilities. Early intervention is key. That is why we are doing the reforms that we are doing. Not everybody likes it, but we believe it is better to do it the way we are proposing so we get the therapies to the people faster and get earlier interventions than is currently the case.