Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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I will come in to make a couple of quick points. I take what Senator Flynn says about data collection. In 2023, Ireland is one of the biggest software exporters in the world but we have to do a census in respect of people with disabilities and their needs to know what is going on. There is something fundamentally wrong when we are still using technology from the last millennium to try to develop policy in this area. It is a challenge right across our health and disability services. The technology is there.

Mr. O'Regan is right about the challenge of vacancies. Regardless of whether this legislation is passed, those challenges are going to remain. If this legislation were properly amended and enacted, it would drive innovation in trying to deliver services. I will give a practical example. We all know of clinicians, the vast majority of whom are women, who have gone on maternity leave or taken a number of years of a break and who would like to be able to continue to work either at the evening or at weekends. Bringing in a level of flexibility would allow parents to attend appointments with their children outside school hours, giving clinicians the flexible time to deliver the services they have spent years developing the skills to be able to deliver. Perhaps they could deliver those services in the evenings and on weekends when their partners are home from work. We could do that in the primary care centres that are open 24-7 anyway. That type of innovation is not considered at the moment. The passage of this legislation would help to stimulate that type of innovation.

The Department asks, rightly, why we would single out a particular disability. The difficulty is there are unique challenges associated with people with autism. That is the reason they need to be singled out. It is not just us saying it. The European Commission said it 27 years ago. I will offer a practical example. When our colleague, Deputy Ó Cuív, was Minister for Social Protection, people will remember that children with autism could not get access to domiciliary care allowance and parents could not get the carer's allowance because of the way the assessment was structured. Deputy Ó Cuív, as Minister, reformed that assessment so that it could make specific provision and include the issues associated with children who were on that particular spectrum at the time.

We were lucky. We had a Minister with an interest who was prepared to drive this issue forward. Every decade or so there is a Minister who is interested in this area. However, we should not be waiting once every ten years for something to happen. The only way we, as Members of the Oireachtas and national representatives of the people, can do that is to enshrine it in legislation. When officials are in from the HSE at this committee or across the corridor at the Joint Committee on Health, they often tell us that this is an operational matter and that it is their responsibility. They say that we draft the law and they deliver on it. We have an opportunity here to set down in law legitimate basic rights that have been promised for the past 27 years. We are saying that this should happen and should happen now.