Mr. Reinhard Schäler:

I want to go back to the question of whether we are a section 39 organisation. I would say that we are. Every year, section 39 organisations have to go through service arrangements with the HSE. It is year-to-year funding. The question is this: how can we develop a brand new service that has no template to follow? We are doing something for a group of people who have literally been left to die. They have been left to rot in nursing homes, with minimal services. One parent was told to face the facts and that what their son needed was hydration, nutrition and medication. That person is actively engaged with our service now.

There was not a service there, so we are developing something but how can we do it on a shoestring? We are delivering a service now for 28 clients. When we started, we proposed something for three to five clients and now we have 28. The demand is growing. How can we hire and pay staff on an annual budget when we do not know what we are going to get next year? We do not need people who are just coming out of university and who have the title to be a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist, a speech and language therapist or a neuropsychologist. We need people with experience. These people are in their 30s. They are not people who are going to work on a six-month or annual contract. They are people with families who have or are about to apply for a mortgage. They are looking for permanent contracts. How can anybody be given a permanent contract if we do not know what our funding will be for next year? If we are being told to expand our service and then six months later we are being told to forget about all of the recommendations and that we are not getting the money, there is no way we can grow.

There is an issue of competition. The people who work with us do not do so because they are looking for job security, long holidays and short working hours. They are people who believe that what they are doing really makes sense and has meaning. These people are really hard to find. Sometimes, I wish we could give those people the same job security and all the benefits that one gets in the public service. We would like to be able to give that to the people who work so enthusiastically with us. Unfortunately, we cannot and this is a big issue.

To go back to the ask, we have developed a service for people for whom there was no waiting list, because they were written off. There were no gaps because there was no service where you could have a gap. It is for people who were literally written off. We have one letter which says these people were written off. It speaks about them being no-hopers and people who were not worth the money, because they did not offer a return on the investment. Clinicians are trained to heal people or rehabilitate them, to get them back to where they were. What we are doing cannot be measured in the same way. We help people to live the life they have been given. We give them joy, fun and an environment where they can live a healthy life. We had another example where someone was going to get some medication to help them with their osteoporosis. It turned out that they did not have osteoporosis. After ten years of being in a wheelchair, they were healthy. They are people who are not taking any medication. We have been told by doctors to continue doing what we are doing, because it really seems to work. People were surprised by this. We see secondary injuries with clients; contractures, foot drop, etc. There is nothing we can do about the event itself, but whatever happens afterwards is our responsibility. We have to take on this responsibility. We are not calling for someone to do this for us. We are doing it and have been for the past four years, very successfully. The only thing we are asking for is that this is recognised and that we be allowed to develop the service for the people who need it. There are not even statistics about them. When we have been asked for numbers and figures, we have extrapolated from some of the experts who reviewed our service. They extrapolated figures from the UK. It is estimated that 25 people per year in Ireland require those services. In the past ten or 11 years since Pádraig's accident there are probably 300 people who have a similar injury. Where are they? Have they died or are they somewhere in a nursing home being turned once or twice a day with a TV as background noise? We do not know. This is also something we are addressing with researchers in UCD who have experience in epidemiology and have done similar studies for cystic fibrosis. We want to find out where those people are, how many of them there are and how can we help them.

The committee has heard from Mr. Grogan about what it means to be living far away from Dublin and what the service could do for his family and his son. Mr. Ó hUallacháin is a professional who has probably been taught how much better people can get through physiotherapy but has recognised now that what we are doing is not just about getting better. It is about prevention and helping people to live their lives with their injury.