Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Previous speakers welcomed our visitors to the Gallery, as do I. It should not be necessary that we would have visitors in the Gallery to pressurise the Government to do what is right. I thank the Sinn Féin Deputies for giving me the opportunity to speak on this motion. I come from a city and a county where services for people with autism are practically non-existent. I became aware of a review, which I will return to shortly, in December 2018 when the Galway Autism Partnership, which provides a service to 200 families, appealed to all local Deputies to do something because it was about to close. It relies on voluntary workers, almost 200 of them, and provides an enormous range of supports. Its unit, which is based in Athenry and serves Roscommon and Galway, had no service at all for people with autism for the whole of 2013. Report after report was produced on that but the service got worse.

The Minister of State's predecessor conveniently avoided telling us when the report was commissioned, when it was published and why there has been a delay. I became aware that the report had been commissioned in early 2017 and was completed at the end of that year. It has ten recommendations and nine themes. The whole of 2018 passed and it seemed the report had not been published until we in Galway asked questions. The common themes which emerge in the report are the lack of clear pathways, there being no support, no training and so on. The most important thing is that an implementation body would be set up to implement the report. It is only being discussed tonight because Sinn Féin has brought forward the motion. In three paragraphs in the Minister of State's four-page oráid, which was not very helpful, there was a distinct failure to talk about the report and why it was not implemented.

The report refers to many other reports. Although I will support the motion, the last thing we need is for another committee to sit on the issue and for there to be more reports. What we want is implementation, and if this motion helps with that, it will certainly have my backing. To quote one respondent in the report, however, "Not another review into services for individuals on the autism spectrum [...] it will probably make access to supports and services more difficult than they are at present". Another said: "Adult services are unidentifiable or non-existent." It refers to six reports but I have added a seventh, namely, the report of the Galway Roscommon autism spectrum disorder service from November 2016. None of its recommendations was implemented. In fact, through parliamentary questions I have learned that the waiting list for services at the Athenry unit has increased. It is now at 31 months for intervention and 27 months for assessment. The non-existence of these services is why we are here tonight.

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