Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I thank Senator Flynn for the question. Regarding mental health, from our point of view, CAMHS is clearly not providing the service that it needs to with regard to accessibility for children, not just with regard to autism but across the disability scale. My understanding is that, at the moment, there are still only five CAMHS with intellectual disability specialists, out of 73 which are in place, which is a cop-out. Our understanding is that there is much more awareness of autism and it is more mainstream, and there should be capacity to upscale all of our CAMHS teams to deal with that circumstance. Again, it is a symptom of pushing this from Billy to Jack, where the GP does not know where to go and primary care is not there. CAMHS is usually the last place that one should be sending somebody. We need to be helping people earlier. Early intervention in schools is something we have been pushing.