Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. He is right. This is an area where a significant amount of work is needed to make progress. There is no doubt about that. I would make the point at the outset that I do not think any one strand of work will get us to where we need to get. We will need to do four or five very significant things at the same time and this is the focus of the Government, including the Minister, Deputy Foley, and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton. The Minister and Minister of State updated the Cabinet sub-committee on disability on this matter in May. We are due to have a further meeting of that Cabinet sub-committee this month.

I agree with the Deputy that the right of a child to access an assessment of need must remain. I really believe that and the rest of the Government believes that. However, I also believe that we need to look at how that legislation works. This has been my view for a long period of time. It is the view of many people who work in clinical practice. It is also the view of many parents, who want clarity and to have a system that can more efficiently but in a clinically appropriate and clinician-led way determine the length of time required for the assessment. I believe in clinicians - not politicians or judges - determining that and that is the piece we want to get right.

From memory, the same article the Deputy referenced concerning the potential number of 25,000 children also spoke about how approximately one third of the children who went through the assessment of need process were determined not to have a disability in that defined sense. We need to give those children that clarity more quickly. Approximately 30% of therapists' time is now being spent on assessment of need. I am not suggesting this is easy, and we want to work constructively to get this right, but I would be misleading the Deputy if I did not say that we were going to bring forward reforms regarding the legislation around assessment of need.

The second thing we have to do - we have made the decision to do it - is establish a national therapy service for education. There are far too many parents who feel such a sense of relief when their children finally get places in education, particularly in special schools, only to then wonder about speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and physiotherapy. I think we agree that it makes sense to have therapy services in schools, starting with special schools and then going into special classes and then into mainstream schools. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, has received Government approval to proceed with that and I expect the recruitment for it to be able to commence very shortly, as in, in advance of the new school year.

I hear the Deputy regarding the pay and numbers strategy. I remember checking this out. If there was a piece of paper that said there was a cap stopping speech and language therapists being hired, I would agree with him 100% but the last time I checked this in recent days, there were funded vacant posts in therapies. We have to look at why those posts are vacant. It is not because there is a cap on recruitment. There are funded posts today that are vacant. We have taken the decision to significantly increase the number of therapy posts in universities - the Minister, Deputy Lawless, has led on this - so that we can have a greater pipeline of graduates. I would like to work with people in a collaborative way on this issue, as would the rest of the Government. We need to kick off a number of major bodies of work across this House in the next few weeks.

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