Mr. Gareth Noble:

I often find it strange how little we hear from the HSE about wanting additional funding to meet its obligations under the Disability Act for recruitment and so on. I recall being involved in one case a number of summers ago where it took longer than the six-month timeframe for a complaint to be heard. In that case, the HSE's solution to the backlogs was not to call for more recruitment of speech and language therapists, OTs, physiotherapists or psychologists. Instead, much to the bewilderment of the court, its priority was to beef up the complaints system and recruit more complaints officers to deal with it. We were going to go from having one national complaints officer, based in Naas, County Kildare, to three or four. That was the solution and it demonstrated where the priorities were and the lack of will to deliver in that regard.

I am asking the HSE to do no more than comply with the law. The law states that its assessments must be commenced within three months and must be determined no later than three months from the commencement. We know, however, that 91% of assessments are not conducted within that timeframe. In addition, in terms of service provision, before coming to this meeting I lodged nine complaints on behalf of families, all going back into the system to try to progress assessments or service delivery. We were dealing with service statements where we were told that the assessments referred to non-verbal children requiring urgent interventions as soon as possible. All these phrases were littered throughout the assessments, yet the service statement today suggested that the earliest day by which these children will be seen for those key interventions is August 2022. That is an unacceptable dereliction of duty and an unacceptable breach of a duty of care.

There is going to be a further cost in this regard. In a High Court case of 2007, Mr. Justice Peart found that four months was an unacceptable period in the life of a two-year-old and the context of early intervention. He said valuable time was being wasted. In the context of a four-month delay, which by the time the child was being assessed had increased to four months, he ordered that child and their parents to be awarded €50,000 in damages. It is crazy that parents would ever have to countenance coming to the likes of me to have basic rights vindicated. I would love nothing more than for my role to be made redundant. The way to make my role redundant is simply to comply with the law.