Mr. Ciarán Cronin:

With regards to the waiting lists, in my opening statement I referred to the home-school liaison programme in our school. Sinéad Fowler, who joins us here today, spends so much of her time sitting with parents and filling out paperwork, applying for assessments and different services. As is the nature of working in a DEIS school, children come from very troubled homes. There is lots of trauma, there is lots of chaos and different things like that, and they miss their appointments then. Once they have missed a certain amount of appointments, they are discharged from the service for not showing up. It would be amazing, and a simple money saver, to see someone who works for these teams who goes out into the community and knocks on doors, as the home-school liaison does in schools, and literally supports the parents by physically bringing them to appointments because it is so easy for us as a school to flag these families. It is a simple point.

The other thing we have seen in school as well is children who may apply for an assessment of need or to a primary care psychologist or something like that, the waiting game of two or three years start, but then, in the middle of that, they move address. There is one child in our school who was living in Dublin 8, right beside our school. He moved across the Liffey to Dublin 7 and it took seven years for him to be seen by a speech and language therapist. The main reason there was because he moved postcodes.