Mr. David Doyle:

St. Joseph's Foundation has 18 residential sites. Twelve of those sites are funded by CAS. Some are privately funded or are managed on behalf of someone else.

I am coming up to 20-something years as a parent of a child with a disability and I can never understand it, really. It is about planning. We are in a very easy sector if we want to look at it like that. When our children are born, be it with autism as in my case or with a disability, most people around us or psychology can tell us what they will need for interventions, for schooling, as school leavers, and when they will need a day service. We have been saying for a long time that we need someone to plan it. There are so many different organisations involved between councils, the HSE and others, and one is blaming the other, or I will not say blaming each other but they are on each side. When we apply for CAS funding, we do it as a housing organisation and we have to get the HSE to sign off on it.

Of course, housing is for somebody to live in. When we are doing this and having to get the HSE to sign off on it, which I am not saying there is anything wrong with, is the HSE thinking about what services I need? If that house is built, revenue will have to be put into it. What we actually need is an overall agency, probably under the Minister for disability. We fought for a long time to get a Minister for disability, but she really does not have a budget. She goes to the HSE for her budget or she goes through the annual budget. What we need is someone who looks at this in its totality.

When it comes to the CAS funding, there are three areas. There is this decongregation which Niamh spoke about, and we have an area that should be planned for which we all spoke about. We know who is going to need residential care. If we look at the statistics from abroad, approximately 65% of people are going to need residential care at some stage in their lives. We need to look at that and what stage we are at with that. Then we have to look at the third area: emergency housing, which is really important for families as we speak. At the moment, all we can get is emergency housing. There is very little housing for the other two areas. We should look at an overall budget and pre-empt it. It should be multi-annual so we have a budget set aside for the decongregation, for the planning process, and for the emergencies. The biggest problem with the emergencies is that they are taking all the physical residential places we have, so we have nothing left for the planned places and those people go back on the list for the decongregation.

I have said for a while that I thought respite should also be covered by CAS funding, in that we should be able to plan for respite. Most families are always looking for respite places. This defers the need for a residential place in the future. It prolongs it. Therefore, the more respite and help we can give a family, the more we will find the residential numbers will come down or will certainly be put on the long finger. I feel we should be able to apply for CAS funding for respite and we definitely should not have to get a sign-off. If I want a residential house today, I do not have to get the HSE to sign off on the fact that I need one. Surely the local authority could sign to say that the person with a disability needs a house without having another agency involved that has to think about getting revenue. It would help with our planning situation if we could plan it better and put somebody into the Department for disability to oversee all of this and put it all together.