Mr. Brian Higgins:

I will address the Cathaoirleach's question about making the CAS system faster and more readily accessible, and the Senator's point on how the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the CCMA and the HSE engage. I will give two examples. Within the strategy, the HSE has the lead responsibility for the delivery of 18 actions. In eight of those, the HSE is directly the lead and in the other ten it is the co-lead. As part of that, Ms Ennis and I sit on the national committee for the delivery of the strategy. Feeding into the national committee are regional and local committees, as Mr. O'Regan has referenced. We meet regularly and there are robust conversations about identifying the challenges and seeking to address them. That addressing has to be at the local and regional levels. There are strong engagements there. Ms Ennis might speak about those in a moment.

I will give an example of where that works in practice. It relates to the Cathaoirleach's question. We had a meeting in December with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, the AHBs and some providers. This meeting was specifically to look at CAS funding, at the blockages that were experienced in reality and at how we could begin a process of trying to ease access to the service. It was a very productive conversation and the beginning of an engagement that we hope will continue. Interestingly, in that conversation, it was very clear that the delivery mechanism is at the local level. For those groups at local level that the CCMA has referenced, it makes a huge difference when the CHOs and the HSE are engaged directly with colleagues in housing and local government.

On the issue of accessibility, the HSE is very much engaged. A high-level senior officials group within the Department of the Taoiseach has pulled together representatives from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform; the Department of Social Protection; the Department of Transport; and the Department of Education. I am there representing the HSE specifically to look at transport for people with disabilities and the challenges around accessibility and independence. We are looking at it initially with a focus on public responses to transport and some of the schemes that are available privately. We meet every month or every two months and that is led by the Department of the Taoiseach. There are quite a lot of interdepartmental and very much connected discussions and responses to try to address those issues. Part of my brief is day services and the school leavers programme. That ties in very much to some of the challenges that we have around access to day services, for example.

The TTMO strategy is the overarching one that denotes the direction of travel in decongregation. As the delivery agent, the HSE is very much involved in that. The policy falls within my brief in the healthcare strategy under the disability remit. We have an office, which may be an overstatement in terms of how many people we have, and Ms Ennis is leading that policy. There was a gap for about a year when we did not have the national lead for that position. Ms Ennis has been in place now for more than six months and has been making huge efforts in that regard. Part of the initial piece she has done is to ascertain where the congregated settings are and who the people in them are. That is very much a foot-on-the-ground process. It involves meeting the individuals and staff in those services and trying to understand where they are at. I will hand over to Ms Ennis to provide further detail.