Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Doherty for raising the question on children's disability services. I want to begin where he began by welcoming the special rapporteur from the United Nations for the occupied territories to Ireland and thank her for her work. With a representative of the United Nations in our country, I want to join with all Members of this House and with the Secretary General of the United Nations in expressing our deep sadness and shock to learn of the death of a United Nations Office for Project Services staff member when two UN guesthouses were hit in Israeli air strikes. Five other UN personnel were seriously injured and, of course, hundreds upon hundreds of people, including children, have been killed in brutal airstrikes over the past number of days, an utterly despicable situation.

Let me first agree with the Deputy. This money should be released. The Deputy asked me what I was going to do. I am going to make sure it is released. I am going to make sure it is provided. I have spoken to the Taoiseach about this matter at the Cabinet committee on disability on Monday. I agree with the Deputy that this issue needs to be resolved on behalf of parents, their children and organisations that applied in good faith for the scheme. I must acknowledge that the scheme was an innovative and good idea to try to find another mechanism to provide much-needed funding and, as the Deputy says, a stopgap level of funding, to provide vital services. That fund needs to be provided. I regret that this situation has gone on as long as it has. I thank the Deputy for raising the issue and for raising the views of Denise. I am sure there are many others like Denise who rightly want to know when this is going to be resolved.

My understanding is that the HSE launched a call for what is called the children's disability service grant fund back in October 2023. There was a quite a lot of interest, which is probably no surprise to anyone, such is the level of need. Following the evaluation process, the HSE confirmed that projects with a cost of around €8 million have met the criteria for the fund. This now needs to be provided. It is no fault of the organisations involved. I am sure many of those organisations are having to deal with the disappointment and concern of parents. My view is very simple, in that, if an application met the criteria under the scheme, that application should be funded. We need to resolve this urgently. I thank the Deputy for highlighting the issue and am happy to come back to him directly on this matter.

This is one measure we have taken and the funding needs to be provided. The second stopgap - the Deputy called it that, but it is an appropriate phrase while we try to build up capacity - is the initiative we took last year to try to provide additional funding for assessments of need, many of which will be required by many of the families the Deputy deals with in his own work. I am pleased to say that an initiative we put in place to provide funding for private assessments of need where required saw 2,479 assessments of need commissioned from private providers between June and December of last year at a cost of €8.2 million. We have allocated an additional €10 million for that scheme this year.

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