Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)

I knew that would be a bit of a crowd pleaser.

More than 15,000 children with autism and disabilities are overdue their assessment of needs and that number is expected to increase beyond 25,000 by year's end. In each one of these cases, the Government is breaking the law. The Taoiseach's excuse for this is that capacity has been reached in terms of psychologists and therapists but a 14-year-old campaigner, Cara Darmody, a Tipperary child, has presented the CEO of the HSE, Bernard Gloster, with options to tap psychologists and therapists, locally, nationally and internationally, who could dramatically reduce the waiting list. Cara was in the Dáil today. She is directly contradicting the Taoiseach's assertion that the issue is capacity-----

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