Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Canney. I agree with him that there is much not to be proud of and much change needs to happen. He is dead right. Coming from Galway county and from east Galway in particular, when people do not have respite services for children and they must ship them down to Limerick to get an overnight stay, it is not good enough. Unfortunately, we are not unique. That is the sad part about it. I would like to think that Galway was the only place that did not provide respite. There are many other such places around the country. Some of the funding I have secured is for capital expenditure to build or repurpose them and to ensure that every CHO will provide at a minimum a respite house. Every CHO will have one, whether for adults or children, by the time I am finished. I plan this year to build approximately six respite houses throughout the country an i hope the CHO in Galway will come forward for one. This applies to other CHOs, not only Galway, as well. It is up to them to put a plan in place for their service level agreement. They should know where their requirements are. I want to work with all of them to ensure that at a minimum we have respite services in every CHO.

The Deputy also asked about the funding, how the funding is spent and holding us to account, and he is dead right. One of the biggest shocks I got when I went into the Department was when I asked where was the €2 billion and one of the officials turned around and said to me that €1.3 billion is spent straightaway in residential care. Another 20% or €500 million is spent on adult day services. That is €1.8 billion of my €2 billion. After that, it is easy to make it up through what is spent on multidisciplinary therapies, respite and other community services. Those are the strands of funding. What we are trying to do in this budget is create more capacity, which is building buildings and procuring more capacity to put the service people into it and also to ensure that we have the therapists to deliver and to work on the children's network disability teams outside of geographical location so that there we would have network disability teams and right of access and equality for everybody wherever they living in the country. That is the priority.