Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)

If I forget any of the questions, the Deputy should remind me of them.

The Government recognised, having regard to the autism innovation strategy, that there is a need to review and update the existing disability legislation, or consider where a need for new legislation may exist. This is particularly true following our ratification of the UNCRPD. My priority is to ensure the policy structures and frameworks are in place to make progress on disability issues across the board so we can advance legislatively and strategically.

On the national disability strategy, the work is nearly finalised, so I am very hopeful that it will be published in the next couple of weeks or in very few months. As part of that, work will intensify on a legislative programme that will have to be set out in this regard.

The Deputy is correct that there is a commitment in the programme for Government to put an autism strategy on a statutory footing. We will be working on that. As I have said previously, there are other disabilities, as we are aware, but a commitment has been made in the programme for Government. I want to get the strategy right and that is why it is really important to have a few more weeks with my Government colleagues to ensure the required ambitious step change is in the strategy.

The Deputy mentioned CDNTs and primary care. It is in respect of these that the strategy is going to work, hopefully with the Department of Health, which is over primary care, and my Department, the Department of children and disability, which is over CDNTs. Staffing is a huge issue right across the country when there is full employment. Therefore, we need to have recruitment drives, but there is a need for structure. My Department deals with specialist disability services but what happened previously was that children who might not have had complex needs were referred from primary care or CAMHS, for example, to different waiting lists. That is inappropriate and unworkable, and that is why we need the one-door structure Bernard Gloster is working on. This will mean that if a person goes into primary care, CAMHS or a CDNT, he or she will not be bounced around from waiting list to waiting list but instead get signposted and treated. This is part of the big mountain of work we have to do. I am aware that Bernard Gloster updated the Cabinet committee on disability on this recently. I will be looking for follow-ups on the roll-out. However, if there are particular issues arising in the Deputy's area, we can come back to them and deal with them separately.