Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Armagh Road and Cork Street services in my home constituency of Dublin South-Central do not have full teams. I received an update recently on the Drimnagh primary care centre and am very excited that a design team has been engaged and it is moving to a more advanced stage but, looking down the road, will it have the personnel to resource it? Although it is a great development, will it have enough staff to man it for that community? That is a concern.

The tie-in with schools is important. If a child does not have psychological services, that may prohibit the child from being in the correct school placement and getting a place in the school because there is no review. Children who are awaiting but not getting psychological services are losing out in the context of schooling as a result. I invite our guests to comment on that.

I have had recent experience of almost a row between primary care and disability services as to which was responsible when a child was falling between the two services. How can that be avoided? In that case, it was avoided by very high-level intervention, for which I am grateful, but it reached a stage where I had to be completely exasperated that a child was continually without carers at a critical juncture in his or her life. How do we resolve that? What is the nature of that relationship between services that are arguing about which of them is responsible for picking up the care of a child in dire need of services?

I acknowledge how demoralising it must be to work in the service and have this constant criticism of it. When we hear of teams only being at 50% capacity, that suggests the staff making up that 50% are working extraordinarily hard and carrying the extraordinary stress and burden of knowing what is not being met. I acknowledge those staff because that must be a difficult place to be when you are so passionate in the delivery. It has been our experience that those who are delivering do so passionately. I ask our guests to respond on those matters.