Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to provide details of the €3.2 billion 2025 allocation in the area of disability services. This is an increase of 12% on 2024 levels of funding and is reflective of incremental changes in funding for disability services, surpassing €3 billion for the first time.

Since 2020, investment in this area has increased by €1.2 billion. In securing this funding, my continued overarching focus for 2025 is to maintain and enhance the provision of person-centred services, by addressing cost increases in delivery of service, providing for demographic change and ensuring services are aligned with the UNCRPD.

For 2025, I have secured an overall increase of €336 million. This additional funding will allow for the following developments across a range of services: €106 million to address the full year costs of this year’s expected delivery on priority residential places as well as support for approximately 70 new residential placements; in the order of 50 Tusla-related responses; and enhancements to existing residential places and support for the upgrade of some existing placement opportunities for new residents. It will provide for additional HSE housing co-ordinators, and it will also support the transition of approximately 20 people from congregated settings and nursing homes to more appropriate living arrangements in the community; and €30.8 million is being allocated for respite and supports to assist people to continue living in their own homes. This allocation will support full-year costs of respite expected to be delivered in 2024, as well as development of services in 2025. The assignment of funding to overnight, day, and alternative respite such as weekend clubs, equine therapy respite, after-school clubs and tea-time respite will be confirmed in the coming period. This will also include the full year cost of around 180 intensive home support and supported living packages delivered in 2024, as well as an additional 150 packages in 2025.

In the area of home support and personal assistance hours, there will be an uplift of 40,000 and 20,000 respectively. Importantly though, I have also set aside additional funding for 2025 to begin the progressive alignment of the personal assistance rate and the home support rate with older persons' services. This in turn should hopefully support the capacity to delivery current hours and further expansion of services, as we continue to develop this important area under the action plan for disability services.

On children’s services, with funding already provided in recent years for additional posts to enhance the capacity of the children’s disability network teams, CDNTs, there will be further funding available in 2025 to continue recruitment. For 2025, there is funding for an additional 20 senior therapist posts, 20 staff grade posts, 20 health and social care assistant posts and 15 clinical trainee posts.

The ongoing assessments of need waitlist initiative launched in May has been proving very successful, with 1,100 assessments of needs cleared across June, July and August through the private sector. I am earmarking a further €10 million for this work, which in turn frees up resources to provide therapeutic supports to children with complex needs. A total of €40.3 million is allocated for day services, adult multidisciplinary therapy and neuro-rehabilitation supports. This includes the full-year cost of 2024 school leaver placements as well as the new cohort of school leavers in 2025.

While there is often focus on therapy provision for children, I am also starting the development of a process to provide multidisciplinary therapy services for adults, which have been long sought. The initial funding will complete a mapping exercise to assess existing provision of services and allow for further development of models of provision. Having also invested heavily in the roll-out of community neuro-rehabilitation teams in the last couple of years, there is funding set aside to ensure the levels of staffing required can be achieved to deliver these crucial supports in the community.

Pay cost pressures also arise across the sector and funding to support the agreement struck with sector 39 service providers is separately accounted for. A combined additional allocation of €4 million will be made available to support disability equality measures. This increase in funding will enable the decision support service to continue to implement the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 and will facilitate the National Disability Authority, NDA, to provide enhanced policy advice to Government on disability issues. The funding will also support the implementation of the recently launched autism innovation strategy, building on existing supports and services by providing a dedicated funding stream for an autism innovation fund of €2 million. In addition, the 2025 allocation includes €18 million in non-core expenditure.

Earlier this year I announced the development of the first ever multi-annual capital investment strategy for disability services. In 2025, €27 million will be provided in capital funding to build and develop infrastructure across respite, residential and day services.

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