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

The Deputy asked about recruitment, specifically on the disability side of things. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, and I are looking forward to the final transfer of responsibility for the HSE's community-based disability services on 1 March. I met the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, and officials to discuss that just prior to this meeting. Obviously, there are many issues relating to disability services. We all recognise the absolute priority of children's disability services and the availability of therapies and interventions for children and young people. A considerable amount of work needs to take place there. Community disability network teams, CDNTs, have been rolled out throughout the country, but there are significant staffing gaps across those. That is having a very significant impact on children and on their parents.

The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has introduced a number of initiatives. As was done with social workers, we want to get these therapist roles on the critical skills list so we can recruit from abroad. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth is working with the HSE to introduce a roadmap on progressing disability services, PDS, to demonstrate in the short to medium term what steps can be taken by the HSE, my Department and the Department of Health to improve recruitment and retention and to improve the engagement between the HSE or the local service provider and parents. As we all know, in many places that relationship has broken down and there is a gap of trust. The roadmap document, which we will produce this year, will be important. It will take some time before all the CDNTs are at 100% staffing. How can we move towards that point? What are the key milestones the HSE needs to achieve to deliver for children in that time? I have no doubt we will discuss that in more detail once responsibility has moved to my Department.

The Deputy is right to highlight the very significant increases in investment in childcare we secured in this year's budget. We have an investment of more than €1 billion in childcare for the first time in the history of the State, which is a milestone we were very proud to break and we did so five years early.

Tens of thousands of parents are seeing a benefit from that from 1 January this year in terms of the increased subvention on the NCS, and therefore the decrease in the fees they have to pay.