Joanna Byrne (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I commence tonight by mentioning and paying tribute to 14-year-old disability rights campaigner Cara Darmody, who began her 50 hour sleep-out protest outside Leinster House this morning. She is here to battle for her two brothers who have autism and profound intellectual disabilities and for the thousands more children like them whom this Government is failing. Despite its denials, it is failing them. It is an indictment of this Government that a 14-year-old who should be studying for her exams and looking forward to her summer break from school should have to engage in such a protest.

The failure to assess autistic children within six months in 93% of cases means the Disability Act is being systematically broken by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Parents and guardians have contacted my constituency office in Louth in their droves, asking for help, as their children are on the ever-growing waiting list for an assessment of need. In mid-2025, Louth assessments of need, AON, service is currently only processing applications from late 2023. The statutory timeframes are not being met due to limited staff resources and an unprecedented increase in applications and workload, which has significantly affected wait times. There are limited staff resources when this Government is flagging a budget surplus this year. Currently, the Louth AON service is outsourcing the vast majority of assessments to HSE-approved private providers, as primary care does not carry out assessments for Louth. Two out of three CDNTs covering north and south Louth, north Meath and Ardee are at capacity for carrying out assessments of need.

Instead of properly resourcing the HSE, this Government is again privatising aspects of our health system and it is not working because the waiting lists are getting longer. Even with this privatisation, Louth's assessment of need service has stated to us that it cannot guarantee statutory timeframes of when assessments of need will be met. Louth has a total of 902 children waiting for assessments of need to be processed. A total of 245 of these children have been waiting for over 12 months, 350 have been waiting for between six and 12 months, and 155 of these children have been waiting for between three and six months. Government ideologies are clearly failing the children of this nation and I urge the Government to put its politics aside and work with the combined Opposition's proposal set out before it later tonight to uphold children's rights and deliver the support that Cara and the 15,296 affected children like her are crying out for.

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