Mr. Paul Reid:

I thank the Deputy for her questions. I will make a few summary comments and then call on some members of my team to give more detail.

First, I recognise that waiting lists for children, and specifically the community care waiting lists for children, are excessive. This is a legacy issue that we are committed to addressing. In terms of how we will address it, we have secured Government funding for our national service plan this year including significant funding for waiting lists overall and a significant proportion of that will be directed towards community waiting lists and specifically, children's waiting lists.

We have a total of around 63,000 children on community care waiting lists that we are anxious to address. That is an excessive list that we want to address. It must be recognised that many children and their families across the country receive good care and services through the HSE. In saying that, I fully acknowledge the stress involved for those children on waiting lists and their families.

On recruitment, we are committed to recruiting into our community disability networks. In 2019, a total of 100 resources were recruited into community disability networks, with a further 100 recruited in 2020 and 85 in 2021. Our national service plan for 2022 facilitates the recruitment of a further 190 network members. We are committed to recruiting into those networks across the country. As I said in my opening statement, recruiting health and social care professionals is a real challenge but it is one that we are committed to meeting and the funding is available to do so.

I will now ask my colleagues Ms O'Neill and Mr. O'Regan to provide some specific detail in response to Deputy Cairns' questions on particular CHO areas and the availability of therapies.