Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Murnane O'Connor. She asked about action plan reporting and monitoring progress to date. The action plan will be monitored by an independent monitoring group, drawing on the membership of the disability stakeholder strategic advisory group and chaired by me. The group will meet twice a year to ensure that we are delivering what is set out in the action plan. The latter covers a number of areas. For example, within it are housing, respite and supported independent living. The purpose of this is to ensure that we are able to hold the Department of housing to account over the period the houses are being built and the it does what it has signed up to do and meet its commitment in the context of the plan. While that Department has taken ownership of the delivery of the housing, I have to fund the services involved, be they for individuals or for supported independent living. I need the properties to be developed, and the Department of Housing will do this.

It is the same with respite services. When we allocate our respite plan budget, we have to monitor that the number of houses and bed nights envisaged are delivered and that those responsible are working at full tilt. The position relating to residential decongregation is the same. Many of the providers are getting to the stage where they have been in operation for 40 years. In Deputy Murnane O'Connor's area, SOS has been in operation for 50 years. These are mainly services operating on the basis of a social model, with only five nurses supporting 80 individuals in residential care. They need extra funding to meet the changing needs, and this is the nursing allocation. Deputy Canney and I have Ability West in our area, which is also a social care model that needs to be a medical model in order that it can meet changing needs. This is so that we can continue to support people. This is what the monitoring group does. The report at the end of the month will show how the first six months of it have gone.

Sometimes we can be overly negative. To be fair to Bernard Gloster and Ciarán Devane, over the past 12 months they have met the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and me every three months. They take on board a lot of the feedback we bring to them. To be very fair, they meet us and listen to our concerns. Our primary concerns are always assessment, recruitment and retention. The board of HSE has given this priority. We must remember that when I was in the Department of Health, I did not have this access to support. While we were in the Department of Health, we did not have access to this frequency of meeting the CEO or the chair of the board.

A focus has been placed on disability within the HSE and it is part of its strategic plan. Much of the commentary to date has been negative but honest. When an embargo was put on recruitment Bernard Gloster did not put an embargo on the HSE. It is unfortunate that we have not capitalised on this to the level we should have done. We have to ask the questions that Deputy Canney asked, as to why we could not capture more staff. It is a fair question to ask when it comes to what is the process that is not working in HR and what is the process that is not working whereby we are losing young qualified speech and language therapists who are not getting permanent contracts. We have to have to ask what is happening within the broader church of HSE recruitment.

Deputy Murnane O'Connor asked whether all Departments work well together. Every Department is a silo. It is only when we moved out of the Department of Health and into the Department of disability that the team got working groups and began building very strong relationships. The new national disability strategy has the various pillars, which means various Departments will take responsibility for disability within their areas. It will be a game changer. We can see this engagement. As Mr. Brunell said earlier, there are so many conversations on transport we cannot say when the most recent one was because it is that fluid and they are happening all of the time. This is the positive space we are entering but Departments have to come to the table.

There is an element involving inclusive education, mainstream education and specialist education and what these services look like. It is not just about making an intervention. What about the child who needs respite, after-school care, transitional care or a day service? It is not just about looking at it through the lens of therapy in a school. We need to adopt a holistic approach for children in specialist disability services. This is what my remit is. It is specialist disability services. It is how children will have a pathway into services such as the Delta Centre.

I will ask Ms Loughman to speak about section 39 organisations. This is an ongoing issue, as Deputy Murnane O'Connor said, but saying that does not mean that it is not getting the full support of the Department, because it is.