Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the CCMA and the HSE for being here with us today.

It is very important to have our local authorities and our health services here because they are the key enablers of people with disabilities to become part of a fully inclusive society. That is what we are here to talk about today and I thank them and all of their teams for all they do.

My own local authority team suffered quite a big loss about ten days ago when our disability liaison access and equality officer, Selina Bonnie, passed away, sadly. Selina was a champion for people with disabilities. She was an absolute advocate for equality and inclusion and she dedicated her professional life to making my local authority, South Dublin County Council, a better and more inclusive place to live. She dedicated a huge amount of her free time to supporting the work of DPOs. She was a witness at this committee and was a witness on the special committee on international surrogacy. I use this opportunity to pay tribute to her on the record of the Houses of the Oireachtas. May Selina rest in peace.

Following on from the last contribution from Deputy Murnane O'Connor on housing adaptation grants, that is something which comes up for me repeatedly. I welcome the inclusion of hoists in the housing adaptation grants. That has been very useful and progressive. I agree that the €30,000 is not adequate in a situation where we know there are increased prices and costs in any kind of construction work. I appreciate that is a matter for the Minister. Perhaps what might be a takeaway for the CCMA is that it is my understanding that local authorities employ different criteria when dealing with housing adaptation grants. I believe in the case of Fingal it does not necessarily cover full retiling for bathrooms or the costs of skips for jobs. In South Dublin County Council, that is covered, but then South Dublin County Council has a particular maximum for bathrooms which I do not see in any circular and which is very much out of kilter with where costs are at the moment.

I thank Ms Farrelly for outlining the disability allocations numbers earlier. They are not necessarily where we want them to be but I suspect they are not even where they look like they are either. What I mean by that is that I would be very curious to know how many homes that have been allocated to a person with a disability are lying empty. I suspect there are some. I know of one in my area, in particular, and I suspect where there are such cases, it is because of the HSE's inability to provide an adequate support package to people. These are people who want to get on with starting to rebuild their lives in the case of an acquired disability, or whose family circumstances may have changed.

The HSE has outlined that we have quite a number of people in nursing homes who do not need to be there. We also have people in the National Rehabilitation Hospital who do not need to be there. I know of a situation where a person is paying rent - I do not know whether it is to the council or to an AHB - on a home that was allocated to them almost a year ago and that person is still in the National Rehabilitation Hospital for no health reason at all other than an adequate care package cannot be put in place. I understand and I am aware that these care needs can be particularly complex, especially when dealing with people with spinal cord injuries who may need assistance with bowels, but quite often those particularly tragic cases are young people who just want to move on and rebuild their lives and who have been given the opportunity by local authorities to do that. I do not know whether it is a lack of resources, expertise or a lack of collaboration but it is happening. It is heartbreaking, and in this day and age it is unacceptable. I have raised a particular case with the HSE and with the Minister in September and I have not had a response. I hope today that perhaps I can get a response from the HSE to that general query of why it is happening that we have people in the National Rehabilitation Hospital taking up what is a very expensive bed that other people may need and are not in homes already provided by local authorities. How can we, as parliamentarians, support the HSE to fix that?