Séamus McGrath (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister of State for facilitating this debate, which we badly need to have. I do not want to repeat everything that has been said. The position is stark with 15,000 children waiting for assessments and very poor figures for those who get assessments within the six months. The overwhelming majority do not get assessments within the six months, which is a requirement under the 2005 Act.

As we all know as constituency TDs, families have to fight for everything. We are talking about assessments of need in the House this evening. The same debate could be had about supports and services following assessments, school places and, of course, school transport and so on. It is a broken system at present and it needs radical change to bring about the kind of improvements that are necessary in the system.

Within that broken system, however, there are positives. What organisations like Rainbow Club Cork - I know the Minister of State is very familiar with that organisation - do in providing services is absolutely astounding. That is an organisation that grew from the voluntary sector through the outstanding work Karen O'Mahony and her team are doing there. We have to look at that model in the context of the assessments and see how we can learn from it because they are doing Trojan work in providing the actual services and supports that are required.

In the Dáil earlier today, the Taoiseach stated that 30% of those assessments result in no actual diagnosis. That is a very high figure and we need to drill down into it because the system clearly does not have the capacity to deal with assessments that are not necessarily required in the first place. It is also unfair on children to go through those assessments. Of course, there will always be a percentage that result in no diagnosis and that is right and proper but 30% is a very high figure. We need to investigate that properly to see what is behind the figure. As I said, the system simply cannot cater for those numbers of assessments.

There are things to welcome from the Government. I know there is a real commitment to this area. There is a significant increase in funding, which is very welcome, and the Minister recently announced an assessment will no longer be required to access the domiciliary care allowance and so on. That is positive. We need to look at social housing and the interaction between assessments and social housing. There are families out there whose social housing application is stalled while they are waiting for an assessment, and that is not fair. The whole interaction between assessments and access to services from other State agencies is something that needs to be looked at very carefully as well.

The introduction of therapists in schools is very welcome and something that should have happened a long time ago, so there are positives. Of course, we now have a Minister at the Cabinet table who will work alongside the Minister of State to try to drive change in this area. That is welcome.

The Taoiseach also mentioned in the Dáil today that there is a finite number of therapists and professionals out there. We all know that. That is the bottom line here. For me, this is not necessarily a resource issue. Rather, it is a capacity issue. It is a challenge for the system to provide the assessments that are necessary but we need to do everything that is necessary to bring about the number of professionals we need to get through the assessments that are in the system. It is a catastrophic failure on the part of the HSE that it was not able to plan in a greater way for the workforce that is required to provide these assessments and services. That is undoubted. This should have been foreseen. There were plenty of flags along the way to show there would be a very high number of assessments. Of course, we hear that figure could grow by the end of the year but let us deal with the facts before us. We have 15,000 who are awaiting assessments and that figure itself is very sizeable.

We need to do what is required to bring about a change in the number of professionals working within the system. Obviously, we have to look at bringing back those who have left these shores to work abroad. We have to urgently bring them back to work within the system, provide the resources and provide the imagination and the changes that are required to bring them back. They can then get stuck in to what is required here in terms of getting through the backlog of assessments so that families can see some light at the end of the tunnel for this major problem.

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