Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Okay, I will follow up on that separately. Regarding the assessment of needs, the children's committee oversees some of disability matters as well and we had the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, in recently, which was great. I want to highlight to the witnesses that there was some discrepancy between what she said and the standard operating procedure, SOP, for the assessment of needs. The SOP specifies that the assessments shall take from one to one and a half hours. The Minister of State clearly stated that was not the case. There is probably a need to update the SOP in relation to assessment needs. Any comments on that are welcome.

With regard to speech and language therapy in schools, we were talking about the different ratios ranging from 100 to 400 depending on the area one is in. I do not mean to only talk about Cork and west Cork, but I do not know of any other area that is in the same situation. I have raised this issue at this committee and at the children's committee. There is no access to speech and language therapy in west Cork so people have to travel. It takes people on Mizen Head or the Beara Peninsula in excess of two hours to get to Cork city for 30 minutes of essential therapy. Many of the people who have been in touch with my office have said that sometimes the people who are accessing the service cannot spend that long in an enclosed space in a car. That journey is up to three hours each way. Perhaps that is the case in other areas in the country but I am not aware of that and I have not heard it mentioned. I know it sounds ridiculous but perhaps west Cork should get special treatment. I think it might be in a special situation which I wanted to bring to the witnesses' attention. If anyone has comments on the points about assessment of needs, SOP and speech and language therapy, that would be great.