David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

I also welcome Cara and her father Mark to the Public Gallery. I have met both of them a number of times over recent years and am always struck by the dedication Cara has to this issue. She started out campaigning for her siblings but is now campaigning for every child waiting for an assessment of need. She deserves tremendous credit.

As others have said, assessments of need for 15,000 children are overdue. A previous Fianna Fáil Government put in place the Health Act 2005. At the time, it was welcomed by campaigners and families of children with disabilities because for the first time, it enshrined in law a right for children. It did not enshrine in law a right to access services but it did provide for a legal right to an assessment of need, which had to be carried out within a six-month period.

The logic of the 2005 Act was that the assessment would be a comprehensive one, that it would be carried out for each and every child in a timely fashion and that it would look at the health and educational needs of each and every child, which makes perfect sense. The same Act also provided for an aggregate report to be published and furnished to the Minister. For years, those reports were never furnished because the assessments did not happen. The logic of that was that the Minister of the day could see what the aggregate need was with respect to health and education services, be it therapies or access to schools. What has happened since 2005 is that the waiting list have gone up and up. Children were taking court cases almost daily through their families to get assessments of need but they were not worth the paper they were written on because the Government simply did not put the services and resources in place. This meant the backlog got bigger.

In a deeply cynical move, what did the Government do? It did not train more professionals or make sure we had more therapists who could carry out the assessments. It came up with what it calls the new standard operating procedure, a yellow-pack preliminary team assessment, and it would have pawned that off as an assessment of need only for parents and me and Deputy Mary Lou McDonald. I met a large number of them and ultimately they took a court case, and we dealt with legal people ourselves at that time, in 2022. That court case was a challenge to the Government's preliminary team assessments because it was breaking the law. Rather than actually delivering for the children and accepting its failure, whereby it had failed over that long period since 2005 to get to grips with this issue, put the services in, train the professionals that were needed and ensure that children would have access to assessment of need but also to services, the Government decided that no, it would break the law. It would just pawn them off with a couple of hours of an assessment and call it a preliminary team assessment. Then the Minister stood up in the Dáil Chamber every month and said that waiting lists were coming down as if she was trying to claim credit for something that was actually an insult to families.

Of course, the High Court said the Government had broken the law and it was called out.

In an even more deeply cynical move, we heard from the Taoiseach today, and I have heard the same from the Taoiseach over recent months, that the Government now wants to bring in legislation that will remove the need for an assessment of need. This will be dressed up. The Taoiseach said today it is going to mean more access to services and direct access to services, with no need to worry about assessments of need, but that is an absolute insult to families. The whole logic of an assessment of need, as comprehensive as it needs to be, is to look at each individual child's health needs and educational needs. If that does not happen, the child will not get the services. When they are told not to worry and that the services will be there, when the very same families cannot get a special school place, a speech and language therapist or occupational therapist for their child, they simply do not believe the Government. They see it as cynical, as I do, because that is what it is. The entire Opposition needs to fight this Government really hard to ensure that if it has the brass neck to come in here and try to remove one of the few rights that children with disabilities have, that needs to be resisted and called out for what it is.

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