Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

I appreciate that it comes under health but there is such a close interplay between primary care and CDNTs because primary care has very large numbers of young people with disabilities.

The reason I asked the question was because I raised the crisis in primary care waiting lists with the Minister of State's colleague, the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, in the Dáil yesterday. I raised the fact that children are being passed from one waiting list years' long to another with no intervention in sight, the fact that there has been a stranglehold on recruitment in primary care services for young people due to the pay-and-numbers strategy and the recruitment embargo prior to that, and even before that, at least in some parts of the country, for years. I also raised the fact that, in Dublin and the North East health region, the situation is so bad that the longest wait time currently is that of a child initially referred to disability services nine years who now faces another wait of unknown duration for primary care psychology.

I set that out and the Minister's response was to quote figures referring to general increases in primary care staffing in the context of the pay number strategy. If I was a clinician working in one of these services in Dublin or Cork where the waiting lists are particularly grave and where recruitment has been so restricted for years - that is an objective fact - or if I was a parent whose child was on one of those epic waiting lists, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the response would have felt like either a form of total detachment from this crisis or a kind of gaslighting. It was almost as if, what are people complaining about we have had such an increase in staff? Meanwhile, in Cork and Kerry, the waiting list figures grew for young people in primary care in psychology from 5,000 in May 2024 to 6,500 a year later. The 5,000 figure was strongly highlighted by my colleague, Deputy Cairns, at the time. The reason that waiting list grew was largely because the service was prevented for much of that time by the pay number strategy from recruiting. I agree single point of access has merit, but it will not paper over the cracks of a failure to resource. The problem now is primary care services are so gutted in some parts of the country that there will be a retention crisis as well.