Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

As the Deputy knows, one of the functions of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform is to take charge of the promotion in these Houses of the legislation which was necessary to deal with the disability area. The Deputy will be aware that last year the Minister of State with particular responsibility for disabilities, Deputy Fahey, and I put in place the sectoral plans to deal with all aspects of disability and the statutory basis for all of those plans to be implemented. Ireland has one of the most advanced laws on disability. The entire disability sector was brought into a very lengthy process of consultation on how we would tackle the various facets of disability in our society. We put through the disability legislation and the sectoral plans. These were published and became the responsibility of individual Ministers with their own sectoral plans in each area.

The correspondence to which the Deputy refers would, of course, have gone to the equality section of my Department and would have been considered there by the Minister of State, Deputy Fahey, and fed into the process which led to the disability legislation being enacted and the disability sectoral plans. This year a sum of €800 million, up 30% on previous funding, is being spent on special needs education. This year we are increasing very substantially the number of occupational therapists in training. As part of the overall expenditure in the health area, the Health Service Executive is getting major increased resources to deal with specific cases of the kind the Deputy mentioned, such as parents whose children are afflicted with the tragic condition of spina bifida. We were speaking earlier about Deputy Kenny's comparison with ten years ago and Deputy Rabbitte's comparison with the unemployment rate of ten years ago. If one considers what has been done in the lifetime of the two Governments, in which the current parties are partners, it is clear there has been a dramatic transformation.

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