Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend the committee on the work that has been done. It affects every public representative in this House and beyond. We continually deal with families who have issues and difficulties with a child awaiting a diagnosis or having difficulty accessing services. Trying to struggle and manage all of that has caused huge stress and anxiety for mothers and parents throughout the country. We continually have to deal with this issue where we find that when they go to the service to seek help, it is difficult to access it. They find it difficult to get the assessments done and they find it difficult, when it comes to schools, to get proper provisions there. There is a whole range of areas where we have these situations. A person in north Leitrim wrote to me recently about their son and the difficulty they had moving from the children's disability network to CAMHS, back out of there and over and back in a roundabout way. The most recent experience of this particular child was on 3 January this year, they received a letter from the children's disability network advising that it was discharging the child and handing the file over to primary care and that they should go to the discharge team, which does not exist. This happens continually. Deputy McDonald raised the issue here recently of a child in south Leitrim whereby the child was told to move out of CAMHS and go to the intellectual disability team. There is no intellectual disability team to go to. They are left in an abyss. This seems to be happening quite regularly, unfortunately. It is causing great angst and difficulty for many families.

I also wish to acknowledge some good work is happening. I recently spoke to a parent who for several years had been going through huge difficulty where their child had been struggling both in school and outside of school. Once they got the correct support and the correct intervention and had the team built around them, the father described it me as being as though a door opened and a different child, who they did not know, came out. We need to be able to do that everywhere. We have the resources. We have the ability to do that. Unfortunately, we do not seem to be doing it right or doing it in an appropriate manner.

The report and the recommendations, as happens with many reports in this State, are put on a shelf and not looked at again. The key issue here is that they are implemented, that every three years through this House progress has to be seen to be made and that regardless of what Minister is in office, that this is going to happen. That has to be the difference between this report and previous reports.

I attended an event in the audiovisual room recently. It was quite horrific to hear of how some children were being treated in our schools. Autistic children need special attention. They need to be looked after properly. There needs to be a mechanism there, that they have the correct resources. We heard stories of children being locked in a room, which is totally inappropriate. This is not something that happened a century ago or a couple of decades ago. It happened recently. The people from AsIAm were at that as well. We cannot have a society that treats our children like that. That is what we need to change. All of us concur that this has to change. We have that society here and now. This is not something that is historic, this is present. That is the difference.

I appeal to the Minister of State, and to the Government, to take the recommendations of this report and to run hard with them and deliver on them. That is the only way we can ensure that all the children of our nation, and adults and everybody else, and families who struggle so much because of the situation in which they find themselves, will be treated properly and adequately. It is not enough to treat the children of the nation equally, we have to treat them adequately as well, and that has been the failure up till now. I will leave it at that.

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