Dr. Cathal Morgan:

I will share a response with Ms O'Neill on the evidence available to us which we feel is worth sharing. I absolutely agree with the Senator on the administrative burdens on children. Professor MacLachlan referred to this earlier. We need to make the service simple for people to access. If one looks at our national access policy, and I mentioned this in my opening statement, there is capacity and flexibility around where children can be met. We want to make this choice-based with families making decisions. In other words, it may be appropriate for some families to meet with teams in the home. It may be appropriate in primary care settings or equally in mainstream and special school settings as well. At a national level, we do not want to be absolutely deterministic about this because we feel that regional community health organisations should be able to sit down with the providers and families to see how best we can provide it in a flexible way with the resources we have. I have no difficulty with the Senator's point of principle. I think she is spot on.

On the Minister of State's intervention on the pause, I mentioned in my opening statement that as far we are concerned the resource that is in the existing settings will not be removed. I will clarify a few points on that. The Senator is correct in saying that we should not be using the €6 million investment as a type of leveraging, pitting one setting against another. The point I was trying to make in my statement was to draw attention to the inequity in the system. I said in previous inputs that we believe more investment is needed. It should be done in a way which brings education, families and health services together to meet needs, rather than an approach of "how does your problem fit our solution?" because that just does not work. The UNCRPD is a fundamental driver of how that should change. To be fair to the Minister of State, her concern has always been that there should be no diminution of the existing resource in the existing settings. Our key concern is around equity - we need to make sure we can provide an equitable distribution of the service and build on that with additional resources because there is no doubt that more resources are needed. I made the point in my opening statement that this is not going to change.

The Senator is right about mainstream school settings. We have mapped all of the speech and language therapy, SLT, supports going into mainstream settings. They are primarily delivered through primary care. Ms Crehan-Roche might speak to this from the perspective of the chief officers in the nine regions, who have agreed that this will remain in place. We understand that it is fundamental for SLT professionals to work jointly with the teaching profession around language acquisition and curriculum attainment. That is important.

The Senator asked a direct question around the involvement of section 38 and 39 organisations. We have granular detail on that which Ms O'Neill will share. We will follow up with the committee on the break-out of that. Professor MacLachlan might come in after that.