Mr. Mark O'Connor:

I wish to respond to Deputy McConalogue’s point. With regard to therapeutic inputs for young children, the situation is that quite a number of disabilities are best treated through education and also with the input of those like occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, psychologists and so on. There is an issue with the current moratorium on recruitment into the HSE, particularly as quite a number of professionals left in the large redundancy programme at the end of 2011. I am involved in the national co-ordinating group on progressing children’s disability services. Quite a number of the regional disability managers have been reported that their staffing levels in therapy services are at crisis point.