Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion by People Before Profit, and the opportunity to speak on it. I am a member of the disability matters committee. For nearly five years, we have been hearing from different parents and representative groups what is going on and the way they are experiencing life, living with a disability or with a family member who has a disability. We hear it in our constituency offices. I am sure every public representative has parents coming into their office. They are caught in limbo and cannot get some sort of guidance or steer on where they should go and how their child should be assessed. I saw this in Tuam in my constituency where a CDNT was opened to great fanfare this time last year.

It has not functioned properly since because we do not have the staff. Parents took to the streets before Christmas last December because they realised themselves, through a family forum, that it was not just one person but that every family was suffering. When a parent, who has just been referred by her GP to the mental hospital because her child cannot get the services and she cannot cope with the stress comes to me with her husband, something is wrong. The biggest problem people who come into my office have is that the assessments are not being done. What I would call a dressing up is what is being done. They are being registered and this, that and the other but the assessment and its results are not being delivered within six months as legally, we are supposed to do. I could stay here all day and tell the Minister of State what is wrong but I believe we have to have a fundamental change if we are to put things right. I thought this change would have come about when responsibility for disabilities was taken from the Department of Health and put in with the Department of children. Now, however, I find the HSE still has its claws in recruitment. The extraction of disabilities from the Department of Health has not happened at all; it has been a charade. I am sorry to say that but that is what it is because the Department of Health is still deciding about recruitment, which is of paramount importance. It is deciding about all those things in which I thought there was autonomy when talking about disabilities but we do not have that. The extraction of disabilities from the Department of Health has not happened. It has been another case of where we set up a new Department with a new letterhead and money spent on it. I am very disappointed in that.

I want to talk about education, schools and special needs schools. There is a fine new special needs school in Tuam, St. Oliver's. It has taken years to get the new school in place. It is now in place but is full to capacity and has a waiting list. In other schools in Galway, such as Lakeview, the building is physically not fit for purpose for its intended use. A new facility needs to be put in place there. Across my constituency, and I am sure every other constituency, certain schools have an ASD unit while other schools do not. A child can be separated from his or her siblings because they are going to the mainstream school and the child is going to another school where the facilities are in place. There is no joined-up thinking. It is harsh, like segregating people based on height whereby someone who is six inches taller goes there or whatever. You end up separating children. The best way of trying to give the best opportunity to young children who have a disability is to get them into assessments and get them into an education setting where they are comfortable and are with their family and friends. They are then seen to be part of normality. However, we try to separate them because we want to make them different.

The SET allocations have been a bit of a disaster. It is important to tackle that before operating school business next year. Moreover, this should not just be done with the snap of the fingers but with a proper consultation process in order that the special education teaching hours are working and are meaningful for anybody. In recent months and especially in recent weeks, I have come across people with special needs who got a place in a school but who do not have a bus to bring them there because they cannot get a bus that will take a wheelchair or an operator has stopped its service or some other reason or excuse. What really galls me about that is that when I make a representation, I am told it is the responsibility of Bus Éireann or something else. It is not; it is our responsibility to make sure that a full service is in place in order that children who have been allocated a place in a special school can get there. I know of one set of parents that is driving three to four hours a day to bring their child to school. They then drive home, drive back to school to collect the child and drive home again because there is no bus that can take a wheelchair. That is fixable. It is not money, it is really a case of somebody willing to drive this to make sure it is done right.

The Regional Group, of which I am a member, will bring forward a Private Members' motion next week on having a non-means-tested carer's allowance. The number of parents who have given up their work and their careers to mind their child and who are being denied carer's allowance because their spouses are working and earn more than a certain threshold is a shame on us, as politicians, in this House. Despite the service they provide and the commitments and sacrifices they make, we say they are not entitled to anything because the husband or the wife is earning money. If the parents do not do it and if the State is asked to do it, it will cost €20 million a year. It is not a cost; it is a real investment to make sure that our children with a disability are cared for in a loving way by their parents and that the parents are recognised for that.

I understand this motion will not be opposed today. I do not read anything into that because I take it as tokenism. What I would have liked to see is a structured response as to how to deal with the issues being raised in the Chamber today. I brought a Bill on autism before the House three years ago. At the Minister of State's request, I deferred it for a year. It has been buried in the Minister of State's Department on Committee Stage ever since. It has never seen the light of day. That is not the way we should be doing our business.

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