Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The question that arises all the time is what good these waiting lists are and what action is being taken to sort them out. For instance, I know of a case of a therapist who is going on maternity leave. The children she was seeing have been told they have to go back on the waiting list because she will not be replaced until she returns from maternity leave. She is probably going to take ten months. The kernel of the problem here is that we have waiting lists, and we can manipulate figures or whatever, but the people on the ground and the parents are not getting the service. They are not getting the early intervention quickly enough. We can have beautiful names and acronyms and everything but at the end of the day, the children are not being seen quick enough. The early interventions are not happening. While we have all these things going on and things being stood down and other things being looked at and other reports being done, children are waiting up to a year and a half or two years for an assessment, whether speech and language or other assessments. That is the problem. How do we address that? If somebody goes on maternity leave, it is well flagged that they are doing so. Efforts should be made to back-fill that position until the person returns.

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