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

I welcome all of the witnesses. I thank the Chair. As Senator Carrigy knows, most Chairs have to provide me with a fair amount of leeway. I pay special thanks to Mr. Doogan, Ms Riordan and Dr. McDonnell. I apologise for arriving late. I had another meeting and the witnesses can throw stuff at me afterwards on anything I have missed. I should put on the record that my wife works for Archways and is involved in the Changing Lives Initiative.

There are two parts to my approach to this. There is what I have seen in my life and what I have seen used in our home, and there is what I have seen through the job we do and the various people who come to us. Where the Changing Lives Initiative is in operation it is sold by schools, community groups and sometimes by State services on the basis that at least it is an option that is there. None of us who have been in this room or in this building in recent years has not used ad nauseamthe term "early intervention". We speak about it but we do not necessarily always see it.

The witnesses are looking at something that is working and that has helped families, particularly children with ADHD. It has been proven to do so, so it is a matter of rolling it out. This State has a big issue whereby we have pilot projects that work well which then get extended to too wide an area with too little funding and do not get extended to all areas. We then end up back where we started.

Senator Carrigy was Chair of the autism committee. One of the last interactions we had was with a team from Scotland on the system there. Everything with regard to autism and neurodivergence in general seems to go through CAMHS. On some level I would be happy to have no wrong door and one place where people could go but this does not matter if people cannot get their assessments. We all know when we are speaking about CAMHS and anything else that we are speaking about silos. An agency will say it can deal with one child but not with another. An agency will say that children do not necessarily fit its criteria and they should go elsewhere. We have a game of ping-pong. Many members of the autism committee spoke about the need to accept the fact we do not have all of the occupational therapists, speech and language therapists or services that we need. They said that we should see what we have and make an assessment on the best service we can provide to people. This is with regard to everything from assessment right through to therapies.

What are the opinions of the witnesses on the Scottish system? From what I have seen of the Changing Lives Initiative, it works best when dealing with parents who opt in. A large number of people are hard to reach. In some cases we will need far wider interventions. There is no silver bullet for this. We can speak about multi-agency approaches forever, but it is a matter of seeing them. I have thrown enough out there to allow the witnesses to begin an answer.