Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It was a pleasure to meet with her last June. She would blow you away when you meet her, as the Deputy knows. She had a number of items on which she wanted to make progress. She has got some of them over the line and I know she wants us to do a lot more. I am very happy to meet her and her father Mark and I will be in touch with them to arrange that. She has written to me very recently as well. I am very happy to accept Deputy Bacik's invitation today to meet with her, so I will arrange that.

The Cabinet committee on children, education and disability will meet for the first time on Monday. The Deputy is right that we have decided to have children, education and disability together. The rationale behind that is that the Department of Education and the Department of children have responsibility for co-ordinating our national disability strategy and the like, and I just felt it was appropriate to use that structure to have them there. This will involve me chairing a Cabinet committee on disability issues once a month. That is a commitment I wanted to give to this issue because there is a lot of work to be done. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has done really good work in this area. Deputy Bacik has acknowledged some of the good engagement she has had. The Minister of State will very shortly publish an autism strategy, which has been worked on for quite a significant period. I will follow up directly with the Minister of State on the issue regarding assessments and the payment of assessments because she gave that commitment in good faith - I have absolutely no doubt about that - on foot of the Labour Party motion, and I want to help her to be able to deliver on that in any way I can. I will come back to Deputy Bacik directly on that.

A couple of other things are worth mentioning. One thing I will want to look at quickly is the issue of workforce planning.

Whether one is paying for a private assessment or waiting for a public assessment, it is true to say that we are not training nearly enough people for therapy posts. I will task the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, with working with universities to see how we can ramp up the number of training places in Irish universities for speech and language and occupational therapy and physiotherapy. We have started on an all-island basis. A number of places in therapies have been ring-fenced for students from here in Northern Ireland since September. I hope we can do more from next September in that space.

The second issue I would like us to look at and which I intend to look at is that of in-school therapies. This had worked well. There were a number of pilots, for want of a better phrase, that had worked in schools in which therapies were provided in schools. One was in my constituency and I was familiar with it. I would like to see if there are learnings from that as to how it could be embedded in the school and health service coming more closely together to meet the needs of the child. I am happy, as the body of work of the Cabinet committee gets under way, to have a debate in this House on what the scope of that work might look like and how people across the House can feed into it. I fully accept we have a lot to do in this space. I will meet Cara in the next couple of weeks and get her views as well.

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