Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the budget again this evening. There are a number of areas I want to home in on.

There is all of the spending that will happen in health and we are talking about all the money that will be spent on disability and mental health, even though I would challenge much of that. However, the biggest problem we face right now is the strike pending in the next couple of days from section 38 and section 39 workers. If that is not put right, our services, which are already collapsing, will be worse off in a couple of weeks.

Ability West in my part of the country in Galway has been closing services for the past six or nine months. These are services for people with disabilities who need help and day services but have no place to go. We are sleepwalking our way into a crisis, rather than solving it. This has been flagged for a good while. There is an urgency to it now. I urge Government to realise this is not a pay issue right now.

It is a service provision issue that is getting worse and that will get worse still. If there is a strike outside the Simon Community offices in Galway or any other part of the country or outside disability service provision centres, it will be an indictment of the Government for allowing it to happen. I urge the powers that be - the Ministers for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, Finance and Health, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, and whomever else needs to get involved - to make sure that the money is put in place or whatever is needed is done to avert a strike and to ensure there is parity.

The other day, an elderly person rang me who had a carer for seven hours and approval for another seven hours. He is in his 80s. He had worked very hard for a local retired group for as long as he could, but he now has Parkinson's. His carer has left the private operator and gone to work with the HSE. The result is that this carer is gone from my friend, who has been reduced to three hours per week because the service is grappling with the problem of getting staff. We are robbing Peter to pay Paul and those who are suffering are the people who need the service. We need to reconcile all of this and restore equality of pay as a matter of urgency.

The retained firefighters have been engaging in industrial action. Again, this is another cohort of people who have served this country proudly through all emergencies, the Covid pandemic and all of the things that we have encountered. They have always been there for us. It is time that we really and truly grappled with their concerns so we have a functional and vibrant retained firefighter service. Otherwise, we will have a situation where there are fire engines in fire stations but not enough people to man them when they go to emergency situations.

The Regional Group budget submission referred to mental health services and the provision of counselling and therapy services for all primary and secondary schools. While we asked for that, I do not think it is happening or else it has been done as a pilot scheme. For the people who pay for the services, we were looking for the expansion of tax relief and for these expenses to be deemed eligible expenses in line with other health expenses. It is important that something like that is done in order that some relief is given to people who pay for the services.

With regard to disability matters, there are simple things like extending the parking permit to a lifetime duration rather than having people review it every few years and pay money for it. As a friend of mine, Councillor Gabe Cronnelly, said, his leg is not going to grow back. He has a disability that is for life, so why do we get him or anybody like him to fill in forms every few years in order to justify getting a parking permit? It is creating unnecessary paperwork and also creating stress for people who are not used to filling out forms and who, really and truly, have a lifelong disability.

There is an issue in the context of ensuring that people with disabilities have some sort of transport supports in order that they are not left grounded or isolated, especially in rural areas. The Ombudsman, Peter Tyndall, in his most recent report stated that we cancelled schemes over ten years ago with the objective of putting in a scheme that was more workable but, ten years on, we have failed to do it. That is a failure of successive Governments.

The Minister for Education spoke about school transport. I noted with interest that additional money is being put into school transport. There is a situation where school transport routes are operating for a week and the buses are then taken off the road, for one reason or another. At the moment, I know of five routes in my constituency where the buses have disappeared. The transport operators tell me the school transport service is broken. I warned last May that we should be prepared for the re-opening of the schools in September. Bus operators were informed two days before the school was due to open that they had been successful in getting a bus route, and they had get drivers, make sure the buses were right and all of that type of thing. When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. That is an apt way of describing what has happened with school transport.

That problem has arisen in special schools. I do not think any of us can be proud that we have special schools without school transport. This is not political point-scoring. I believe we need to look at every route as a matter of urgency. People who are entitled to a school bus service do not have one. That is apart from the fact that concessionary tickets have not been issued. In some cases, people who applied for the concessionary ticket and did not get it, but who are hoping they will still get it, get an email thanking them for submitting an email that they did not send and talking about a refund. In this day and age, with all the systems we have, it is wrong that we end up in a situation where a school bus cannot be found in so many cases. This might affect 15% of the overall population of the country. I do not know why but I have had people from Fermoy ringing me about school transport, so it is not confined to a particular area. I ask the Government to look at this as a priority and a matter of urgency.

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