Ms Sarah Murphy:

I can talk about my experience. My son is 14 now. When he was younger, we lived in St. Catherine's catchment area and it provided a lot of the services. It had a multi-disciplinary team. However, Progressive Disability Services, PDS, has watered down those services. The aim was to remove the geographic element whereby the kind of service one got depended on where one lived. The idea was good, that there should be national provision and everyone should be getting the same services. It should not matter, in terms of one's diagnosis, whether one lived in Galway or in Wicklow.

My son went to a preschool which was run by St. Catherine's. They rented a house in the middle of Bray. They had a lot of students in there and provided speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and psychology services. There were new graduates in disability studies, people who had done social care and people who were training to be social workers. It was absolutely brilliant. He was there for three or four years before he started school. He did not start school until he was six.

That service is gone because the funding is gone from St. Catherine's. I think it went a good bit before that. Then he went into mainstream, and then it was the HSE's services. He has Down's syndrome as well and most children with Down's syndrome have speech and language problems. Within the HSE disability services, it took maybe two or three years to get things up and running and meanwhile he is growing up. Now with the new progressing disability services, PDS, he has moved on and is in a special school. There was a speech and language therapist in that school but that therapist is long gone. He has not had speech and language therapy for six years or maybe more. I cannot even recall. Unless I pay for it myself he does not get it. The social worker from the services came out but that is it. I feel a bit sorry for her because she has nothing to offer. She has come with empty pockets because they do not have the therapists. The therapists who are in there are so inundated with so many needs. There has been such a lag because it took so long to implement the thing in the first place that the therapists are moving to the private sector where we pay them to do the services. We had something ten years ago that really worked for my son. It was absolutely brilliant. But anybody who has a four-year-old now has nothing. We had a good start for him and I am very grateful to St. Catherine's for that. There was a very good CEO there who, a bit like Miriam's school principal, thought about how they could make this work for the child. It was all focused on the child but in my opinion, what happens now is that everything is very systems led. It is about the Act or the school or the service. There is lip service paid to "It is about following the child". In fact, none of these people would have jobs if it was not for our children, but it does not follow the child. It is really about the system. One must fit in. Any services to which my young fella had access, for example when he was six and in St Catherine's, he completely lost when he moved schools. It took years to get those back up and running. Once they did get back up and running we made a few relationships with therapists. Then that was lost again because the new progressing disability model was brought in and the new CBT team.