Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has been appointed to this area of responsibility. She is colleague of mine in the Galway East constituency. She has taken on a role in which, from her own experiences she knows well, there are many challenges. I also look forward to working with the chair of the disabilities committee, Deputy Moynihan. I look forward to working with all in a proactive way to ensure we make changes that will improve the lives of people.

The programme for Government states what it will do about disabilities. There are two particular funding streams involved. There is the capital funding stream required to provide facilities for our people with disabilities and their families. We also have to look at the fact that there is a growing demand, whether we like it, from two particular streams. First, there are more cases of young children coming forward with more diagnoses. We then have older people who are caring for a special needs person in their family. These parents are getting older and are in need of care themselves, meaning they are trapped. We need to have a two-pronged attack to deal with these issues.

We need to make sure facilities are in place. I congratulate the Minister of State on the amount of funding she is putting into service. However, I term that as reactive funding. We need to ensure we have funding to provide for what is needed, as well as for emergencies. We must be doing that on a multi-annual budget basis.

No Member will disagree with any of this debate tonight. However, we need to get the funding in place and get over the barriers involved. Transport was mentioned earlier. In our constituency, we had five families who needed to find their own way to disability services every day. That issue has been resolved temporarily until next Christmas. That is not the way, however, we should be treating children who need day services. We must ensure we deal with this in a way that is truthful with ourselves, with the families involved and the people who need the help.

We know the effect of Covid on many people. I know for sure that in my constituency office since Covid arrived, we have had more people contacting us, reaching out and crying for help because they were completely stuck. We left them stuck. I regret that we have done that as a society and we have left them to fend for themselves. We need not ever do that again.

The Minister of State must ask the Minister for Finance why he has suspended the primary medical certificate scheme. I know a legal case had been taken. I questioned the Minister here several weeks ago about this but he did not tell me he had suspended the scheme. I have people who are in need of the scheme. We need to expand the scheme to help people. As the Minister of State knows from living in rural Ireland, not everybody is living beside a service. To be able to access a service, one needs to have a car adapted but there is a huge cost in that. There is a scheme in place and we should get on with it. It is one of the biggest indictments that the Minister has actually suspended this scheme. If that is the policy, we are going no place fast with all the nice talk we have about disabilities. That issue needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency.

I thank Sinn Féin and all the other parties which co-signed this motion tonight. It is an act of solidarity with people with disabilities.

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