Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Tully for tabling this motion. It is important to state that the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Disability Matters has worked hard on many issues over the last two and a half years. Hopefully, we will bring forward some supports for people with disabilities, in conjunction with the Government, which is what it is all about.

When I meet parents in my constituency who have been told that their child has a disability, they end up trying to cope with that fact first of all, and then they try to come to terms with how they are going to get help for their child. One of the key elements that always seems to be missing is that they do not know where to start or how to progress from one place to another. There is no key worker assigned to them and no plan is set out detailing where the services are. There are gaps in the services and parents are left in a fog a lot of the time, when they are also trying to cope with the fact that they have a child with a disability. This can wear families down because they are fighting every inch of the way to try to get something which is a right for their child who has a disability. People often tell me they cannot access speech and language therapists. I do not know what has gone wrong there, but there is a huge void in that particular service.

The other issue I worry about, when we talk about services, is that we are relying on section 39 organisations, such as Ability West, to provide them. We also rely heavily on the Irish Wheelchair Association. Yet we do not pay the people working in these section 39 organisations the same as we pay people working for the HSE. If we are going to provide equal opportunities and supports for people with disabilities, we need to ensure the people who are trying to help them are also paid accordingly.

Another issue I often come across is the fact there are young people in nursing homes long term because there is no other place to put them. It is an indictment of our society that we continue to allow that to happen in 2022.

Another issues that comes up, as the Minister and the Minister of State know, is that we have a broken transport support service for people with disabilities. The criteria for primary medical certificates are unfit for purpose. The members of the appeal board have resigned and, a year later, we are still talking about considering how to put a new appeal board in place. That is another matter about which we should hang our heads in shame. It is not right.

The Indecon report that was conducted and published in 2021 was based on living costs in 2019. It set out that a person living with a disability had additional costs that must be met by the State. There was a glimmer of recognition of those additional costs in this year's budget, apart from the cost-of-living agenda, and €500 was allocated for people with disabilities. However, that is a once-off payment. We must start by making that an annual payment and increasing it incrementally until we get to a level at which people are being supported properly.

In the past three months, I have met a good number of parents who have struggled to get school transport for their children with disabilities. I know of one school where four children were left without a service for three weeks because of the mayhem around school services. The situation has been rectified in the past week but it has caused a considerable amount of stress to parents. It is stress they do not need and should not have. It is stress that should never have been there. One thing we can learn from what happened with the school transport service is that before we come up with a great public relations stunt in the future, we must ensure it can work. We must think it through before we announce it.

Many reports have been done, but at the end of the day, we must ensure we deal with people who have disabilities in a way that is fair and reasonable. We must give them every chance to live as normal a life as possible. We have many things to do yet. A parent of an autistic boy said that instead of assessing a child as having a disability, we should look at the child and say he or she has different abilities. If we think like that, we will be much better off.

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