Ms Áine Lawlor:

I will start at the beginning. Are there enough places? No. There is a commitment from the Government for new places. One course in speech therapy had additional places this year and more are due to come in over a number of years. That will need to continue to be developed. It is not just about places. There is also infrastructure and there needs to be a commitment to student places so they can actually train across all our professions. It is a bigger piece than just allocating places to universities.

The Deputy mentioned that we do not have enough therapists to fill posts. That is certainly part of the issue.

Ms Mortell and I sit here as managers of services that have vacant posts. We cannot find therapists even if we are allowed to hire them. There are certain pockets of our health service that need support to find and access therapies. There is a retention issue and there is also a places issue. It is not the sole piece of the narrative. I can find therapists for certain services if I was allowed to hire them. There is also an issue with hiring that we see consistently throughout pockets of our health service too, which is related to the pay and numbers strategy.

In terms of assistants, the Deputy asked how we feel about that. We absolutely support the implementation of assistants. They allow us to look at our therapy delivery models, be more effective and utilise time more efficiently but they cannot replace the therapist. That is our concern with the introduction of assistants in disability services because they were going in where there were huge vacancies and into unsafe roles. We can see in the NCSE model, in the context of education in schools, that assistants are going to be part of that, with the appropriate supports in order that they can be part of a team delivering therapy. That is definitely welcome.

The Deputy also asked about alternative therapies. There are lots of ways that we can intervene for children and access supports for them. We often talk about alternatives. Horse riding is useful for people. We call it equine therapy sometimes. We need access to activities that are suitable for children and interesting to them. We need to be able to adapt those for children, however that might be.