Tom Clonan (Independent)
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I will finish now because I do not want to keep the Leas-Chathaoirleach any longer. I really appreciate the representatives’ responses and their candour. During the financial crash, we got intellectual honesty from the banks to a certain extent, because they put their hands up, said they had failed and said that we needed help from outside the jurisdiction. We handed our financial and fiscal sovereignty over to the troika and we paid for that because the debt was socialised. All of us - our children and our grandchildren - bailed them out. Despite the fact that my friends in the EU characterise the situation as them bailing us out, it was us who bailed them out. We are still paying for it. One consequence of that is the lack of investment and funding that is being experienced by St. Michael’s House.

In the same spirit of intellectual honesty, if we are to take a rights-based approach, it behoves us to accept that the system is failing families because of the reasons the representatives have articulated here, although I do not say that St. Michael’s House has failed. This is therefore no criticism of St. Michael’s House and I do not assign any blame to anybody in this room. Yet, as a committee, it behoves us to really hammer home to Government that what we have had for the last ten or 12 years is not good enough. If we are going to meet our commitments under the UNCRPD, if the Taoiseach follows through on his promise to ratify all the protocols, and if we are really to adopt a rights-based approach, like everything else, we have to pay for it. If we are prepared to pay for bankers’ debts, then this is a very modest ask.

I thank the representatives very much for their answers. A huge volume of correspondence is coming in about unmet need, whether it is the case of services for children being cancelled at the last minute, or about how every year parents have to campaign to have services retained for the children over periods. It is disheartening. I thank the representatives very much for their evidence.