Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and her officials to the committee. I have been listening to the debate since I came into the committee room. I read the Minister of State’s opening remarks - I was in the Dáil while she delivered them. I will return to the Committee on Budgetary Oversight when I am finished here. Like me, the Minister of State gets queries coming into her constituency office. When we look at people with disabilities and things that should be changing but are not changing, one thing that stands out is the disabled drivers and disabled passengers scheme and the primary medical certificate. There has been no change to the criteria. This week alone, two people who do not have the use of one of their arms due to surgeries visited my office. Both of them have been refused a primary medical certificate. They cannot drive a car unless it is adapted to suit their needs. They are losing their independence. One of them is a young man and, having gone through the trauma of treatment and so on, he finds himself in a very poor place at the moment.

Anther issue which came up this week is EmployAbility services. Two people who visited me had a problem having left the employment they were in. One person’s condition flared up, which meant he could not work. He is now ready to go back to work and his employer wants to take him back and the EmployAbility service wants to put him back to work, but there is some kind of a standoff whereby, for whatever reason, the Department of Social Protection will not give the re-referral to let him go back to EmployAbility. These are two such cases. I can send the details to the Minister of State. There seems to be an attitude since the EmployAbility services changed their status. There seems to be a standoff on it.

I was going to ask about the optional protocol but the Minister of State has answered on that.

Regarding CDNT staffing, has there been any progress in bringing people back to the country, such as speech and language therapists? Has anything happened in the past year or two years such that we see numbers of them coming back? Are we attracting them back?