Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

We have no indication as to when we will have our hearing before the UN committee. It is delayed significantly at UN level. I had assumed it would take place this year but it could well not happen before 2024. As Minister, I would have found it useful to have gone through that process. I have done it for the human rights committee and next week, I will be doing it for the Committee on the Rights of the Child. I will go to Geneva to go through that process and hear from the experts. I will be defending the State on some matters but will hear the committee's views as to how the State could do more. It would have been helpful to have that report on the UNCRPD but it is out of our hands.

The Deputy made the point that the option of an individual complaint is not open to disabled persons. She talked about remedies that are available through the courts and said that is not the preference. It is not good practice that so many individuals have felt the need to go to the courts to secure remedies for those rights or particularly for the rights of a child with a disability. I fully recognise that. We also have the equality Acts, which provide remedies for persons with disabilities. As the Deputy knows, my Department is reviewing the equality Acts at the moment.

The Deputy also asked about children's disability services. Until 1 March, I will not be fully responsible for those services so while I am not speaking in a vacuum, I am not the Minister in charge at the moment. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, and I are looking forward to that responsibility coming over to my Department. We are cognisant of the real pressure that the lack of services is placing on children and their parents all over the country. The challenges are worse in some parts of the country than others but they are all over the country. As the Deputy stated, there are significant issues with workforce planning and a lack of availability of therapists. The HSE is currently working on the progressing disability services, PDS, roadmap, which is a document setting out immediate and longer term actions that the HSE is seeking to undertake to support the community disability network teams to ensure we can increase the number of staff involved and retain the staff who are currently there. The PDS roadmap will also look more to the long term to ensure we are training more occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and psychologists. The Deputy is probably well aware of the strategy review, which stretches to 2032. That review makes clear that the need for specialists and therapists to deal with children's disability services is going to grow in the coming years. We are not training enough specialists in this area at present. We need to do more. We need to be putting in place university and college courses now. We need to be considering conversion courses and the like. We need to do everything we can to broaden the pool of therapists available to the community disability network teams across the country. There is a range of other issues that will be set out within the roadmap. By the time of the transfer, I will only remain Minister with responsibility for disabilities for a maximum of 18 to 20 months before the next general election. However, getting people back into community disability network teams is going to be a priority. That is the way we can make the most immediate impact on the lives of children and their parents.

Significant work has taken place over the past year to enable the new strategy to come in. That work took place with the steering group of the existing strategy. They were a number of presentations and consultations in respect of the new strategy. Significant consultation will take place in quarter one of this year. My Department and the National Disability Authority will co-host a consultation exercise on 31 January. During quarters one and two of this year, there will be extensive engagement with DPOs, service users and civil society on the new strategy. Perhaps at some point we will talk about the committee's views on what the new strategy should look like. The most recent strategy contained a significant number of action points. I chair the Traveller and Roma integration strategy, the women and girls strategy, the migrant integration strategy and the LGBTQI+ strategy. I feel that fewer actions and more deliverables are preferable. When a strategy includes 120 or 130 actions, Departments can cherry-pick. Sometimes focus on the core is lost. That would be my approach but that is my view from my own experience from some of the other strategies. The goal is that the new strategy will be ready by the end of this year and ready to apply from the start of 2024.