Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We have a few minutes left. I want to ask about the same issue Deputy Durkan raised regarding children with special needs. Mr. Sullivan spoke about recalibrating and remodelling how we deliver services. During Covid, many of the hospitals and services we bought in such as Citywest were not being used and people said that was a missed opportunity to deal with some of the waiting lists. Have we learned from mistakes that were made in the past? Mr. Sullivan said in his submission that 98% of Sláintecare projects were on track in June 2019. It is now October 2020, so after seven months of Covid, what level of disruption does he estimate has been caused to that timeline?

As Deputies and Senators, we hear about the delayed diagnosis issue all the time. For orthodontics or children with braces, the delays are years in some cases. For ophthalmics, eyesight issues, or cataracts, people have to travel to the North in many cases. In some cases they wait years or possibly worry about going blind. Deputy Durkan also talked about kids with special needs waiting. In CHO 7, which covers both our constituencies, children are waiting up to two years, or even two and a half, to get an assessment. They then might have to wait another two and a half years to get speech and language therapy and so on. We are talking in terms of 12 weeks to get into the system. People at home want to know what is being done to fix the services that are clearly broken the areas we have outlined in those questions. I do not know if the witnesses have time to answer as we only have a few minutes. Perhaps they can come back to us.

I apologise to the witnesses who did not get in and have waited patiently here throughout the session. It is just the system under which we are operating. My colleagues are probably upset that they did not get enough time either but I really appreciate the witnesses' input here today. I invite them to sum up in the minute or two we have left.