Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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The witnesses are all very welcome. I will jump straight into children's specialist disability services. I accept what Mr. Gloster said in the sense that what people want to see and want to have are therapies and supports for their children. There is a particular issue. We had Cara and Mark Darmody here, and their fear is that we have not sweated the private sector sufficiently. They would say it has been a failure by Government with regard to making sure we know what capacity there is. I have no issue with having conversations with the likes of speech and language therapists, SLTs, occupational therapists, OTs, and psychologists. All the organisations have stated at times that what is lacking is the conversation with them on the best means of providing therapies and the assessments. Parents are still being forced to get assessments for schools or whatever. No matter who says they do not need them, the fact is that they are told they do. I know the numbers have slightly increased with regard to the children's disability network teams, CDNTs, but my fear is that even if we fill that entire number of unfilled positions, we will still not be able to provide the capacity.