Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister on her new post. Like Deputy Devlin, I worked with her for many years when she was in charge of education. I just hope she can bring some of the energy and hard work she showed there. She was not afraid to make hard decisions when they needed to be made. I hope she brings that to this Department because it is very much needed.

I listened to the Minister's opening statement in my office. She spoke about workforce strategies and how she would try to tackle the recruitment problems. Fundamentally we need to reflect on why we are failing to attract staff into HSE disability services in particular and why we are struggling to retain them. A period of reflection is required to ask those pertinent questions when the Minister goes about the work of trying to fill those gaps. In the last estimate, my CHO had a vacancy rate of between 50% and 60%, which is intolerable.

My second point is on service level agreements. In the majority of large providers particularly in Cork - this is probably true in the rest of the country - SLAs have not been signed for 2025. How can particularly the larger providers recruit? As Deputy Devlin mentioned, how do they plan for capital projects if SLAs have not been signed for 2025? It is nearly March. It is critical for the Minister to take that away from this evening's statements. She needs to speak to her officials to progress those SLAs and get them signed.

My third point is on waiting lists. Other Deputies have mentioned OTs and SLTs. I recently received a response to a parliamentary question on psychology waiting lists for children and adolescents. In my CHO, in the area of Cork north Lee 435 children and adolescents were on the waiting list in 2020. We had 1,905 in 2024. We can attend all the public meetings we want, we can deal with parents at our clinics and we can deal with the special schools in particular, but fundamentally we are clearly going in the wrong direction. I genuinely hope in the term ahead the Minister can at least halt that increase in waiting lists.

I am not sure if she visited the Rainbow Club in the past. When Senator Rabbitte was Minister of State with responsibility for disabilities, she visited it on a number of occasions. It provides autism support for more than 1,300 children. Cork City Council recently disposed of a former HSE building and provided it to the club on a short-term lease with a view to extending it in the future. We are now looking to make it the Rainbow Club's home. It will require massive capital investment. Capital investment has been provided to other providers. The Minister might sit down with the Rainbow Club in the near future to discuss those plans.

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