Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change)
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Every time I speak to families in my area regarding accessing services, the costs, trying to get private access to assessment of needs and therapies such as speech and language therapy, the hurdles people have to jump and the struggle they face to get basic services do not just upset me, they upset the families. I welcome the work of Inclusion Ireland on supporting families and people with autism.

The question is what can be done about it. We have been talking about this for so long. It was the same with the Joint Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community, of which I was a member. There are more reports, recommendations and situations that have been teased out on health, housing and other areas but those recommendations are not being implemented. Education is based on assessment of need.

That is the main thing in education in an autistic person's life. If a child does not get a proper assessment of need we have no chance of moving things forward. That was the huge failure of setting up the CDNTs and pulling those children and families away from the organisations they were linked with before that, where some of them were getting speech and language therapy and so on.

What can we do? We know that over 1,000 children had assessments of need at the initial stage of CDNTs being set up and they were useless; they were not what was needed. Our Lady of Hope School in Crumlin was set up recently and it has no therapists, even though it is a special needs school. The reason it does not have them is the children do not have assessments of need and so they do not know what the children need. That is one of the reasons it does not have therapists. As well as that, as was said, one third of the CDNT posts are vacant, which is a problem anyway. Is there a case to be made that we should look at what happened initially with the CDNTs and then pull all the specialists in the different community healthcare organisations, CHOs, together and say we should redo all children's assessments of need so we know what those children need? The next step is to try to recruit people to offer those services. I am fearful that because of the crisis in the CDNTs and with the therapists, the service will go into private hands and an awful lot of parents cannot access private services because they are full. The unmet needs cost, as was mentioned, is just building up. Is there something crucial we could do to set up children for the future? Then we could work towards pulling together those therapists who are needed to support children.

I want to ask Dr. Roddy about the national autism innovation strategy. Who set that up? Is it set up or is it going through the process of being set up? How confident is Dr. Roddy that this strategy will be implemented? It has already been mentioned that an implementation plan is needed for the disability capacity review as well. What can the committee do to push forward some of the basic things we have to get right to move on from the rest of the issues like housing and planning. We should be legislating that so many houses in any complex should be set aside for disabled people or for people with autism in the future. That should be in the planning laws.

I was listening to what Ms Locke Reilly was saying about incontinence nappies. I was talking to a family about this six years ago. The father was proposing that there should be a special collection and a special bin for incontinence nappies that would be collected for free because not only is this costing families more money, but from an environmental point of view they should be treated differently from the point of view of disposing of them. We have bin collections that are privately run, however, so that was not going to happen. Maybe we could propose something like that to the HSE so it could provide some sort of service to those families such that incontinence nappies could be collected and disposed of separately.

The following point is for Ms McDonagh and I mention the conference that Inclusion Ireland held. A variety of people, organisations, teachers, special needs assistants, the Ombudsman for Children and Irish human rights and equality policymakers attended. What will happen from that conference? What can the committee do in approaching the national autism innovation strategy? Should we insist that organisations like Inclusion Ireland be involved?

Dr. Roddy said there are only three health economics experts in the world. They should be on that and implementing that. I will leave it at that. There were some wide-ranging comments there.