Ms Suzanna Weedle:

Mr. McGrath raised a really important point on equality of access to counselling and psychotherapy and more generally, there are difficulties with funding and access to talk therapies in mental health care. There is an organisation called Disability Psychotherapy Ireland which is a very small organisation, an interest group of psychotherapists who provide psychotherapy services to people with a disability. For anybody listening or counsellors or people providing those free services, if they are interested in supervision in that area they do provide those supports. That is important because as Mr. McGrath said one needs to know that a service is accessible and that they are able to provide the accommodations one might need to access therapy and that it will be a welcoming and safe environment to go into. I wanted to say that organisation is there. In terms of autism and CAMHS what we have heard is that because CAMHS is so under-resourced, it has massive waiting lists and that there can be, understandably, a defence of the resources it does have because it is trying to meet the need. That comes back to the drastic underfunding of services, particularly in CAMHS.

There is a defence of expanding the remit when they cannot meet needs at the moment based on the resources they have been given, for the waiting lists they have.