Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming before the committee. I had to leave to do an interview and I apologise if I repeat some of what has been said. To get into generalities, we are speaking about supports and a framework for disabled children and autistic children and adults to provide them with what they need to get through this world. We are not in any way delivering on this. It has been said by many people that it is all well and good to say there should not be silos but there are. On one level parents do not particularly care once they find a solution to their problem. The witnesses deal with parents of autistic children who, for example, cannot get a strategy, way or means to deal with an anxiety issue. They then go to CAMHS and there is a game of ping-pong over and back in which nobody takes responsibility. Therein lies the problem.

What we are dealing with across the board is that generally this works when there are outlier parents, outlier educationalists and outlier people who work in healthcare. There are plenty of them, thank God, but there are not enough of them. We accept that people are dealing with services that do not even have the positions filled. There are issues that even if rectified today would take four or five years to see throughput to workforce planning. There are also such issues from the past. People are told they do not need an assessment of need but are then told that they do need one from the point of view of school resources. We need all of the services to speak together and review of what is needed.

With regard to adult services, even Ministers will say that services fall off the edge of the cliff. We need research, we need best practice and we need to fill the positions that are vacant at present. However, the plan we are going with will not necessarily deliver. We will never be able to deliver everything for every child but there needs to be some element of bespoke service. There needs to be a means and an attempt to deliver a service for them and provide them with an individual framework. The committee has seen some very good practice, such as the work of the Trinity Centre on disabilities on facilitating people into employment and changing the nature of how employers see this work. This will not be suitable for everybody but it is about how we put everything together, from the research to something that works.

Even if we fill all of the positions on the CDNTs and could access more services in the education system it would still not work completely because we would not have crossover. We will always have a game of ping-pong until we change things. Let us see whether somebody puts a 100% spectacular framework in front of me on how we would deliver this. I would be delighted. The witnesses have two minutes.