Mr. Bernard O'Regan:

This is understood by us to be an absolute priority. I have said it here, and at meetings of other committees, that we share the commitment that members of this committee and other committees have, which is that our children are the future of the State. What we do for children is critical. In this sense it has to be a priority that the gaps in services and supports that are there now are unacceptable and everything must be done to try to address them.

In the recruitment and retention work being done in the HSE at present, disability is one of the areas that is an absolute priority. It would not be wrong of me to say this. In some of the work we are doing we are trying to prioritise supports for our staffing recruitment for disability services and mental health services as the two priority areas. Part of this involves making it an attractive place to work. Ultimately where people have choices they will choose where they want to work. We want them to choose to come and work in disability services. We are doing a lot of work to try to portray it as positively as possible. This is challenging. Deputy Cairns knows that every time we put something positive in the public domain, someone comes back and says "Yes but". We try not to ignore the "Yes but" because it is the real experience of people but, on the other side, we want to try to make it as positive as possible in order to improve the recruitment.

From the perspective of the Department of Health and of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth as we move towards it, and from the perspective of the relevant Ministers, this is an absolute priority. They are definitely communicating this to us also. In this sense we are trying to come at it as focused as we can while recognising it is not any one thing that will fix it. We have to work at a few strands to get to the overall goal of improving recruitment.

The issue with regard to competing challenges is not entirely in our control. We are legally bound to meet the obligations of the Disability Act and we have to comply with the law. When we fail to do this we are subject to court actions, as Deputy Cairns knows. Trying to balance from out of the one pool of scarce resources the legal obligation on the assessments of need and the absolute necessity that interventions and services are at the core of what we should be doing is difficult. It is extraordinarily frustrating for families and there is no doubt about it.