Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Tully and Sinn Féin for bringing this motion forward this evening. I will probably jump around a bit based on the Minister of State's statement. One thing that leaped out for me, which I did not see early enough but I am glad to see now, is her ongoing negotiations with the Minister, Deputy Harris, about the training and long-term supply of staff for whatever grades are needed.

For a long time I have been asking that this should be one of the primary focuses of the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, not just in disability services but across the health service in planning the training and delivery of all the staff and grades we need for the services we need. I could spend time saying it should have happened a year ago and all the rest, which I am doing, but I commend the fact that this is up and running. Hopefully that will start to bear real fruit and we can be communicated with on it.

There are gaps in our knowledge as to where the recruitment and retention crisis is failing. We are hearing that workers in certain grades are departing our shores to go for higher paid jobs and we are hearing that they are moving out of the cities, including Dublin, to go down the country because they cannot afford to live in Dublin and there are varying degrees of truth in all of that. However, we do not know how many people we are training and then retaining in our services one, three, five or ten years later. That is vitally important because the CDNT issue is so big. The 28% figure we have for vacancies not filled feels like it is higher in respect of service delivery and in the lack of service delivery. In my experience, service users have been devolved from existing services - which may not have been amazing or all they needed - out to a community service that is non-existent. That is a reality and that is where the CDNT system is failing those families.

I have had one family from the south of the country onto me who have a young boy with Down’s syndrome and who is non-verbal. They are looking for speech and language therapy and the child is on the cusp of having an autism diagnosis as well. To compound this, as he has a younger sibling who also has been diagnosed with autism, there are complex and multiple challenges in that family. The services that they are being offered are once-off, over the phone or online and then that is it. My concern is how is that being fed upward? Is it being fed upward in the system as if they have received the service and that family has had its box ticked? It probably has but we know they have not received a service and those parents are trying to hold down full-time jobs, run a household, pay for private care and be full-time activists on behalf of their children and that is just not good enough. That is the CDNT system failing. I have other similar examples, including in my constituency but we are talking about families with more than one child with complex needs that need the services and that are being let down, which is just not good enough.

Where is the action plan for the disability capacity review? The Minister of State looked at me there but we need to know where it is and when it will be delivered. The last time we debated this in the House was during another Private Members' motion from the Social Democrats on 6 July. We were hoping against hope that the action plan would be published before the recess. We then hoped that when we came back after the recess it would be published before the budget and it was not. We are into October now and things have gone unerringly quiet on that front. Will we see it before Christmas? Will we see it at all? Will we see the detail of it? That is what we need to be able to mark the Government's progress and to mark whether we will be able to tackle the need in the disability service. I have spoken about that at length before and I do not need to remake that case but we are 15 months on from the disability capacity review. The Government's disability capacity review was published and we still do not have the action plan for it. We have action plans for other things, including the climate action plan, and people and families with disabilities feel that in the overall scheme of things it is a modest thing to ask for an action plan for the disability capacity review.

On the cost of living, while there were some one-off payments announced in the budget, the cost-of-living crisis that we have all been discussing for a year has been discussed as a new phenomenon in Ireland. There has been a permanent cost-of-living crisis for people with disabilities. Again, that is not just me or anyone else saying that; that is the independent cost of disability in Ireland report, which was published last year. It shows that on average there is an extra cost of €9,500 to €11,500 per year for people with disabilities. That extra cost goes on food, heat, transport and all the things we all need. This was proven before this cost-of-living crisis became a mainstream debate and before the war on Ukraine happened. This was already a chronic issue for people with disabilities at that time.

What that report highlights is that even in benign times, the cost-of-living crisis is real for people with disabilities. When it exists as it does now it becomes manifestly worse for people with disabilities. We are trying to manage our budgets to be able to afford a weekly shop for families or households that do not have complex nutritional needs, do not have to buy vitamins or medications, do not have extra transport needs in order to get to hospital or medical appointment or therapies if they have them and need not keep machinery or aids on 24-7 or for many hours during the day. The louder we talk about a cost-of-living crisis in the mainstream debate the more diminished the cost-of-living crisis for people with disabilities becomes because it gets pushed further down in the debate. It is always the Cinderella, not only of the health service, but of political debate. That is why I welcome this motion and the opportunity to debate it.

I have asked about the disability capacity plan. The Minister of State mentioned Fórsa in her contribution and what it has asked its members to do. That was not in the Minister of State's written statement or at least I could not see it. I will go back and check what was said but I would appreciate it if the Minister of State's office could circulate something on that so I could have a better understanding in order to be able to respond appropriately to it. As I was speaking I was trying to find reference to it in the copy of her speech and I could not find it. What the Minister of State was saying seemed serious and worthy of more investigation and study.

I will leave it at that. I have made my points clearly. The motion is strong and it is another motion on this issue. The Opposition is building on previous motions and the calls are consistent and clear. We become more and more disappointed as we reach Dáil recesses and budgets and we are not seeing what we need to see in the provision of services for people with disabilities.

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