Mr. Mark Smyth:

I will follow on from Mr. Noble's point in response to the Deputy's question on whether this was down to money or staff. It is down to both. A good argument has been made that, if there are long surgery lists, one hires more surgeons. One does not shorten the length of the surgery, offer fewer surgeries or ask someone else to do it. It is a case of insufficient resources.

The system is working well in some areas. They have sufficient staff to meet needs. We have a postcode lottery, and that is not good enough for parents. There is also a recruitment issue with the hiring of health and social care professionals, HSCPs, through the HSE panel system. It does not get the right staff into the right place. That is a barrier to making the system work.

The current standards-based system works. In areas where it works well, though, it will not work any more after the new preliminary team assessment, PTA, model has been introduced. The committee should be in no doubt that the PTA model is not the equivalent of a yellow brick road to enlightenment whereby a child's needs will be identified and met. It is a pathway to a further Oireachtas committee hearing in a year's time when children's waiting lists have moved from three-to-five years to five-to-eight years. I spoke to colleagues this morning, and none of them had a waiting list of less than three years. In one area, parents were getting standardised letters saying that, at the age of five years, their children would be seen at ten and, at the age of ten, their children would be seen at 15. We need to get ahead of this now so that we are not back here in a year's time and exactly what we have predicted has happened.