Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will try to give the Deputy as much information as possible. We have managed to secure €20 million from the Department of Health and €10 million from the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government. As I have already stated, there is an additional €1 million for transitioning. That €10 million will be for each of the next four years. That is an agreement we came to with the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, and we are insisting that when it comes to housing strategy, one cannot possibly allow people with disabilities to be outside that loop.

There has been a difficulty in certain areas and the Deputy knows about the shortage of housing and blockage in the capital assistance funding. It was always going to affect us because of the downturn in the economy. The Deputy knows there was also a difficulty relating to people who were presumed to lack capacity in signing leases. The capacity legislation deals with that now, which is very important. There were delays in securing HIQA registration and we are talking about small community homes, as opposed to what we were used to with big institutions. There has also been insufficient funding from service providers to allow the transition to occur. I will try to answer the other points in my next contribution.

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