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

I thank Deputy Coveney for his questions. I will try to be as succinct as possible. It is sometimes helpful to understand the breakdown of the budget. From a residential point of view, and I am talking about 2024, not 2025, 57% of the budget is spent on residential care supporting 8,600 people. On day services, 24% of the budget is spent on supporting 21,000 people. A total of 5% of the budget is spent on supporting respite, be it for adults or children, which concerns 6,200 people, and 6% of the budget is spent on children's services. That comes to 95% of the budget. The last 5% is spent on community, personal assistance and home support. That is the overall pie chart as to how it falls in the €2.8 billion. It is not based on 2025 but it important to contextualise it for 2024. Residential care, as the Deputy can see, takes up nearly 60% of the overall budget. There are also day services. When I talk about children's services, sometimes we hear that 100,000 children in children's services are awaiting access to therapies. Under specialist complex disability - this is the difference; sometimes people do not realise there is primary care and complex disability teams, which is what I am responsible for as Minister of State - there are 40,000 children supported under that complex piece. I hope that goes some way to answering the questions. The 57% equates to €1.65 billion, 24% is €700 million, and 5%, for respite, is €135 million. When we came into Government in 2020, that was €80 million. I have grown it to €135 million. A huge focus across all parties has ensured respite has been key. A total of €170 million is being spent on children's services, while home support, personal assistance and community are the remainder of the budget. I hope that answers the Deputy's question.

The core of the question related to the delivery of children's services within the school environment. Part of the PDS model was the extraction of therapists within the school environment and the creation of new schools. No support mechanisms were put in place to acknowledge even their existence or bandwidth in the local CDNTs. The Deputy has been very vocal on and a strong advocate for the Carrigaline school. If the records were ever to stand in relation to all of the communications, there has been serious communications with the new school in Carrigaline.

The Deputy mentioned the pilot schools. The pilot school programme on which the Cabinet committee on disability landed is in a very positive space. For the first time, there was collaboration between the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, the Department of Education, the NCSE and the HSE in identifying and meeting the needs for support. The Cabinet committee has been very clear: it is not aligning to but is in-school therapy. The Department of Education chose the first six schools that came forward based on need, feedback from the principals and their requirements. Carrigaline was one of the schools.

It is important to be truthful and transparent. While we have spent a lot of time talking about putting therapists back into schools, have those therapists landed to the breadth of what we wanted? There is a 0.5 whole-time equivalent speech and language therapist and a 0.5 whole-time equivalent occupational therapist, amounting to 1.5 days per week in agreement with the principal. That, to me, does not equate to what was asked of the pilot model, which was in-school therapy delivery. The frustration of that was borne out this time last week, when Andy Phillips, the new regional executive officer, made a decision, and the Deputy mentioned St. Killian's, that where a school principal is able to access private therapy themselves, he would release funding. If the school principal was in a position to access private therapy support locally, the HSE and he as the regional executive officer would support the principal with that funding. It is something the Deputy called for and his colleagues had looked for for a long time in Carrigaline but the willingness in the local HSE perhaps was not there to deliver upon it. High credit to Andy Phillips; he has made the decision to operationalise it.

Another part of the frustration, which may not be known to the public and which I have been battling for two years, is that Fórsa has a role to play. In two of the schools, while there might be some co-operation, there is not full co-operation with Fórsa in the form of the agreement of its members to operationalise the request of the Government for therapists to go back into schools. This time last year, Fórsa also decided the PDS roadmap was not at its standard and it held that up for in excess of six months. I say as a Minister of State, and I do not say it proudly, that it is highly frustrating when trying to do a job for our most vulnerable. We as the Government secured the funding, gave it to the HSE to operationalise and then a full stop was put on it. Parents do not want barriers; they want delivery.

Parents want to see their children receive a service. It is important, Chair, if you do not mind, that I tell the truth of some of our barriers in trying to operationalise the delivery of service. There are two schools in Cork into which Fórsa is preventing the delivery of therapies. It is very hard for Deputy Coveney or any of his colleagues to do fair representation when there are those barriers. This time last year, I had the problem with the PDS programme and the assistant therapists being operationalised. We still have that barrier, but Fórsa is aligning more to accepting.