Dr. Cathal Morgan:

I welcome the remarks from the Chair. She did an excellent job of summing up the key concerns. We will provide whatever support, assistance and participation are required by this important committee by way of reports and information.

I will close by reflecting on a couple of important issues. One concerns the involvement of parents and people with lived experience, in other words, people with disabilities. They will have a central involvement in how we deliver better supports which meet the needs of people's real living situations. We are already doing that, as I mentioned in regard to Professor MacLachlan's work. I mentioned some examples regarding the autism community and the improvement programme being developed in that context. We have parents and people with lived experience on the clinical design programme. We are committed on a regional basis because we need not only top-down approaches but also bottom-up approaches.

Each of the CHOs has to establish and is committed to establishing forums which allow for participation and ensuring the parents' voice is heard. It is important to get across that for quite some time the progressing disability service forums do include parental representatives. We want to ensure it is happening equally and comprehensively in each of the nine regions. We are committed to doing that and to ensuring that it genuinely allows for parents to have a real role in how we develop services and also to be critical friends. During Covid, but also before that, parents have been under tremendous strain which is why we are committed to reform, not for its own sake but putting in real investment. I reiterate the point that the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has made huge strides in securing additional investment. This year's budget will be €2.2 billion; there is an additional €100 million in our base budget, and an additional €28 million once-off funding to deal with the assessment of need backlog but also for the transforming lives scheme, which aims to help services change how they do business, give additional resources in important areas such as access to equipment and also access to intervention programmes. That is making a real difference.

I mentioned the programme for Government which commits to working towards implementing the capacity report. That is critical for us in the context of looking at a longer-term approach in investment in disability services insofar as we make sure we do the necessary reforms to meet the conditions of the UN convention. I cannot emphasise that enough.

We really welcome today, we have been looking forward to it. We are very much committed to ensuring that the committee gets all the information it needs not only around policy but, as I said in my opening statement, welcoming the Ombudsman's report. The HSE will play its part in implementing its recommendations in the context of the policy that we are already, and have been, implementing.