Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for her passionate advocacy on behalf of that child and his family.

What I have done as Minister is to recognise that for so long disability was the poor relation within the Department of Health. We have taken it out of the Department of Health and brought it into my Department. That applied from March 2023, more than 18 months ago. There is so much more that I and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, would have loved to do, if we had the time to do it. However, in those 18 months we have recruited a person in the HSE to look just at workforce planning for the disability sector. For the first time, there is a clear focus on what the disability sector needs. For the first time, there are two Ministers actively engaging with the HSE board and the HSE chief executive and saying “Bernard, we know cancer care is important and the issue of trolleys in emergency departments is important but we need you to focus on disability every single day.” We are seeing changes. We got the optional protocol ratified and we got the new national disability strategy which is to be published in the next number of weeks. Changes are happening but I absolutely recognise there is a long way to go to support children and families on our CDNTs. I acknowledge that.

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