Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

I want to welcome Cara Darmody and her dad, Mark, to the Gallery. It is unfortunate they are here. I would draw their attention to the fact that the Government has circulated its response to this debate already so no matter what is said here on the floor of the Dáil, its script is already written. It has already decided what it is going to say. It has made it very clear it has no intention of listening to what the combined Opposition has to say. It has made its mind up. It has its script written and will deliver it there at the end. In fact, I will bring a copy up to the Gallery and they can have a read of it if they would like to.

I want to pay tribute to Cara and her dad. Cara should not be here this evening. She should be at home. She should not have to protest outside the Dáil for basic services for her brothers but let us be honest - she is here because they have been left with no choice. Like any campaigner who has been around, she will not be fooled by all the Government’s chat about committees and how well it is doing and all the backslapping that it is doing to itself this evening. It does not fool Cara; it does not fool us, not even for a moment. The Government has created this crisis. That is why we are here. It is not Cara’s fault or ours – the blame rests with the Government. The buck stops with the people on the big bucks. Action is what is needed, not more fine words. The Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, told us the Government is moving in the right direction. How dare she say that when the figures obtained by my colleague, an Teachta Kerrane, show that 10,000 more children will join the list by the end of this year? I want to recognise the work done by advocates like FUSS Balbriggan and parents like Jodie Reid who have been forced onto the streets to campaign for services for their kids. In my constituency, kids wait the longest. We have been utterly failed by the Government so when the junior Minister, Deputy Naughton tells us that it cannot be fixed overnight, the Minister will forgive me for reminding her that Fine Gael has been in government for 14 years. That is almost 6,000 overnights. I do not know how many more overnights the Government wants to be afforded. We understand that it is complicated but we also understand that the people who caused the crisis will in no way be the ones who will fix it.

I had every right to be angry when I heard the Government representative from my own constituency read out her script, commentating on the length of time the kids in my area have been left by her Government. Shame on her. She quotes the shameful record of her Government. She quotes the statistics but she fails to recognise the humanity behind it. Take one family with a two-year-old son awaiting an assessment of need for over a year. They are desperate to try to speed up the process so he receives the help he needs. They are privately paying for speech and occupational therapy: €190 a week; €95 a session; €10,000 a year. They have to earn €16,000 a year to pay that. Another family with a boy who is two, and on the waiting list for the CDNT in Balbriggan, has been told by a healthcare professional that the wait for an assessment could be between four and six years. The family has been told it is really important he gets speech and language therapy and occupational therapy now but he cannot get it until he has been assessed. Shame on this Government.

See this speech in context