Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On speech and language, I do have the figures. There are about 8,000 children waiting on initial assessment but most of those are waiting less than 16 weeks. There are 14,000 waiting on further therapy and again most of those are waiting between zero and 16 weeks, and 16 weeks or four months is the target waiting time. When we see those big figures it is important in terms of accuracy to divide them roughly by half because half the people are waiting less than 16 weeks and others are waiting more than that. No matter how good a system we have, we are always going to have people waiting two, three or four weeks.

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