Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North-West, Fianna Fail)

I might try to divide my time. Six minutes is such a short amount of time. It is more of a challenge for the witnesses than for us. We have the easy job of asking the questions.

First, on the DPOs, maybe to reassure the witnesses a little, no Oireachtas committee's agenda is set in stone. It is set by us, as a committee, and we can change it at any time and can decide to do that as a collective.

Second, the day we were setting our agendas, earlier that morning I had been at a DPO meeting for Dublin city. The public participation network for Dublin city in the Finglas office had held a meeting. I was blown away by the concept. More needs to be done to raise our awareness of DPOs. I have loads of questions about how that fits in with the multitude of representative organisations already in this space. For example, in the area of meeting the real cost of disability, I did some work with different organisations on the social welfare changes. There is not a huge consensus in this space about how we can provide different levels of financial support for people who have different levels of need without introducing arbitrary categorisation and so on. DPOs could provide that space, and this committee could provide that space, in a way other organisations are not able to. The multiple levels of need as regards people from different sectors is really interesting, and perhaps we might come back to it as a stand-alone meeting where we would discuss DPOs and how Government agencies are engaging with them. I ask for just a general comment on that. We might come back to the witnesses on it.

I am anxious to engage with Ms Darmody and Mr. Darmody on assessments of need. I am looking at this maybe in too simplistic terms in the sense of the delivery of a public service that should not in any way differ from any other public service we deliver. It should be delivered and there are ways in which that is done. It would appear, from what we are told by Departments, Ministers and so on, that there is not a financial constraint in terms of the delivery of the service; the real pinch point seems to be in the recruitment of therapists. The law is established by us here in these Houses. We could change the law in the morning, we could extend the timelines, we could remove the law and we would comply, but that would not be a desired outcome. The law is there as what should be the minimum threshold but we are not able to meet it because of a medium- and long-term challenge of recruitment. How do we get past that?