Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

Since Ms Justice Phelan's ruling in the High Court, in which it was found that the preliminary team assessment did not comply with the Disability Act 2005, we have undertaken a revision of the process and issued interim clinical guidance around it, which has received the support of legal opinion. We are waiting to meet the unions as we are obliged to do under the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, regulations in order to be able to commence the new approach. The new approach is a tiered approached. It tries to tailor the assessment to the complexity of the presentation and ensure we do not have overly long presentations. As Ms O'Neill stated, we have found that when people have extremely lengthy presentations, is takes away from the time available for intervention.

Deputy Cairns used a powerful analogy when we were before the committee previously.

We said we had 91 disability teams and she said that if we fielded only half the players on a team for Ireland, we would not say that was a team. To be quite honest in our current circumstances as well as being under-resourced, as committee members know, the situation with the assessments of need takes the ball away from us because we have to direct resources to places that are required to fulfil legislative responsibilities, rather than the interventions we desperately want to provide.