Mr. David Doyle:

I would ask why there is no plan. We need to examine who does the planning. There are professionals and experts and the experts are the people with disabilities themselves, along with their families. Until there is a coming together and a meeting of those minds, we will never get a proper structure for the planning of people's lives. I said in my submission that strategic planning for people with autism and intellectual disabilities is relatively easy compared with the acute sector and Covid-19 has shown that. It is lifelong and we know what will happen and what is needed during early intervention and when people are exiting school and entering adult life. We can plan for that but there is no structure to get the professionals and the experts together.

It is like the country itself; it is driven by budgets. The country is driven by cash coming in and cash going out by December. The opportunities for future planning and multi-annual budgeting are not there at the moment. We cannot plan for two or three years down the road because we do not know at that time whether our capital budget for next year or the year after will be guaranteed. Until a structure is put in place such that a plan can be provided with multi-annual budgeting, there is not much hope of us ever planning for the future.

Progressing disability is an interesting question. We have huge waiting lists and moving people around without putting in more therapists might not work. There is a lack of speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and psychiatry. We need a commitment from the Government to put in greater numbers of staff in those disciplines. The caseloads within the HSE are huge and I feel for the therapists because their jobs are impossible. A lot of them are going in and doing the assessments but there is no point in doing the assessments unless we have the intervention at a later stage.