Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)

I will come back and follow up in writing on that. The Deputy makes a good point as well. I always stress when travelling around the country and visiting services that there is a lot of fantastic work happening within the disability sector. Sometimes those working within the sector talk to me about the narrative out there. We all understand the challenges that have to be dealt with and there are families out there who are waiting too long on these waiting lists for their children to access these services. As part of this, we need to be recruiting and retaining more, which we will be doing, and that will also hopefully build the morale of these fantastic teams on the ground who are dealing with very challenging situations in trying to get through these waiting lists.

We are also looking at our third level system. We had 150 extra therapists going through our third level system last year, going into first year. There will be more placements this year, developing the future pipeline. We are also looking at the national CDNT training programme. We have the expedited CORU registration process, which is for bringing therapists in from abroad, making sure we are doing absolutely everything we can to recruit qualified therapists in this area. We also have bespoke initiatives designed to provide specialist supports for children with complex needs and their families.

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