Ms Teresa Mallon:

I thank Alison and the Chair. I agree with Alison in that I do not believe the New Directions standards have failed. The standards are extremely positive and very focused on personalised service provision, and individualised service provision for people with disabilities. They are very focused on promoting more inclusive communities for people, the whole area of active citizenship, developing the individual's independence, and improving quality of life for people.

It is also important to put on record a point that Deputy Ellis alluded to earlier about the voluntary sector. We are providing the majority of service provision to people with disabilities in Ireland. Prior to most of the national policies currently in place and the legislation or the new directions policy the voluntary sector was extremely creative and extremely forward thinking. It was really positive and innovative in looking at really good quality service provision for people with disabilities and additional support needs. That was at a time when there was very little funding. They have been around for many years. The sector has been extraordinarily focused and committed to the provision of high-quality, rights based disability service provision at a time when we had not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and we did not have all of the legislation and policy that is in place now. I do believe we are on a journey. There is a lot of good collaboration and communication happening between the sector, the umbrella bodies, the HSE and the relevant Departments. That is really positive. As Dr. Harnett said, and based on everything the members have heard this afternoon, the whole area of having forward planning and ensuring sustainable funding is really important.

The sector has had regulation in place for residential respite service since 2013. That put a huge focus on resource allocation to residential respite services because of it being regulated. With day services, it is fair to say that we are the poor relations in that regard because all our focus was putting in the regulated services, from a Government perspective.

We welcome the whole monitoring of day services going forward. I sit on the national group on that. It is very positive that it will be outcomes focused. It looks at what is important to the person with a disability in the context of their life. It looks at the whole person-centred planning process and the quality of that and how good it is. It looks at how we support people to look at their life vision and to develop really good goals. This is very important and we welcome that. There are lots of positive green shoots happening at the moment and going forward.

One of the earlier questions talked about the area of recruitment and staffing. It is fair to say there are significant challenges within the section 39 agencies because of their historic funding situations. I represent a section 38 organisation. It is a very large organisation and there are significant challenges within those services as well and particularly in the Dublin region because obviously a lot of agencies are competing for the same category of staff and so on. This has a huge effect in staffing and provision of quality services. Some services would say that at this moment in time they are at a point where they are only able to deliver a safe service rather than a quality service because they have so many vacancies. All of those elements impact on our ability to be able to implement the new directions standards. We are working on this together but, as everybody around the table said, we need a really good plan and we need sustainable funding going forward. As Dr. Harnett said, while it has been extremely positive, the focus of funding has been towards school leavers and not to the existing cohort of people that we have been supporting. In that sense we have a situation. The nature of our service is that we support people from early adulthood to end of life. When somebody enters our service at 18 years of age he or she will most likely remain with us for the rest of their life. We have not had an individualised costing model of funding for those individuals and as needs change we do not have the appropriate funding to meet their needs. We are on a journey and it is positive there is a lot of collaboration happening in relation to all of this at the moment.