Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I do not know if any of the Ministers or Ministers of State here have had a chance to read Ciara Reilly's article in the Irish Examiner. It is very powerful and concerns the way this budget, in reality, fails families with children who have additional needs. She really puts her finger on it. This applies to all the tens of thousands of children with additional needs, but even more generally, it speaks to the nature of the budget the Government has introduced. She writes:

So even after the "biggest giveaway budget ever", the State is effectively telling us: We can’t (or won’t?) provide adequate services to meet your child’s needs; here’s money to pay for it yourself. It’s privatisation by stealth: A quiet acknowledgement that families are being left to shoulder the burden alone.

That is the attitude of this Government and this budget. It is extremely neoliberal. We have a €25 billion surplus. We have the Apple tax money included in that. The Minister for Finance told us yesterday this money has the potential to be transformational. What is there then? There are an extra 85 therapists in a system where 110,000 children are on waiting lists and the Government is only giving people a little bit of extra money. Ciara Reilly also states in her article that:

Families like mine cannot afford to wait years for the system to catch up when we’re already dealing with long waiting lists and limited-to-no access to state-funded services. The only option for families like ours is to pursue staggeringly expensive private therapies. Occupational therapy alone for my daughter costs €95 a week — that’s €5,000 a year, after tax, from our own pockets, on just one therapy that the public system simply can’t offer. Then add the costs of speech and language therapy, dietician care, and the separate courses I’ve pursued to try to learn to assist her at home.

She makes the point that all of it is necessary.

This Government, with an unprecedented surplus and the opportunity to actually deal with these issues, is not doing so. I will give another example of the case of Cyra Cahill, who will be turning five years old next week. She has epilepsy, an eating disorder and is autistic with a PDA profile. Cyra has been failed in so many different ways. I will go through some of them. This case encapsulates all the different ways children, vulnerable children, children with additional needs and children with disabilities are failed by this State every day. Ultimately, this comes down to a political choice - to choose to fight for the rights of Apple and the rights of big multinational corporations as opposed to fighting for the rights of these children.

Cyra's mother, Charlotte, makes the point that from the very start of Cyra's life, she has been failed by our State and our leaders.

Cyra was born at 37 weeks and had some complications arising from birth. Six months on, her mother was contacting the public health nurse looking for assistance relating to her child not sleeping, being extremely sensitive, never stopping crying and so on. The only help that her mother was given at that time was an online parenting course. Fast forward to when Cyra was 18 months old. Her mother was very worried that she had regressed and that there was something serious happening. She was told by the State not to get her hopes up, that this can take years and was advised, exactly like Ciara Reilly says, that if she could afford it, to go private. Charlotte went private but was failed there. Cyra ended up being assessed by a psychologist who was a fraud and who recommended medication that almost killed her. Then Cyra finally had her assessment of need. Her mother was ecstatic because she thought this was then Cyra would start to get what she needs but Charlotte says "Little did I know, this was only the start of the rodeo." She found out that the assessment of need was done incorrectly and was told that Cyra was on a waiting list to be reassessed. She was brought in again but, again, she got nothing. Another assessment was carried out but this was also completed incorrectly because it was only done by a psychologist.

That brings us up to April of this year. Charlotte went down the legal route and finally Cyra got an assessment of need. Then she was awaiting the report. Six weeks passed but there was nothing from the CDNT, no assessment of need. Charlotte knew that school applications were opening and she did not have a report to support her applications. She could not wait any longer so she pushed and got a service statement. The service statement says that Cyra will get services in October 2026. That means her file may be opened and she may be offered a so-called early bird course. Charlotte has been looking for assistance, in effect, since her daughter was born but by that stage, in October 2026, Cyra will be eight. There are 52 mistakes in the report. There is no cognitive assessment, which means that the vast majority of schools will simply not look at her application. She has applied to 32 schools this year with no success. Now, with her updated report, she meets the criteria for only four of those schools. She has had two CAMHS refusals, two home care package application refusals and her mother says that now she is effectively locked out from the private sector too as the therapists keep moving.

I will stop because my time is up but I could go on in terms of the way that Cyra is being failed by this State. Ultimately, that is a political choice. We are obviously weeks away from a general election being called. This Government promised again and again that it would ratify the optional protocol to the UNCRPD. It had better do it or it will be letting families like Cyra's down extremely badly.

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