Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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12. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the number of people waiting to access children's disability network team, CDNT. services in Cavan and Monaghan for a period up to three months, three to six months, six to 12 months and greater than one year. [49902/25]

Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister will acknowledge that one of the more difficult parts of our job is dealing with the families of children waiting to access children's disability network team services. My question relates to CDNTs in Cavan and Monaghan. How many children are waiting to access those services for up to three months, from three to six months, up to 12 months and greater than one year?

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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The Government and I recognise the importance of early intervention for children with disabilities and of ensuring they receive the right service at the right time. Under the programme for Government we are committed to ensuring that children and their families who need early intervention and therapy input can access that support in a timely way.

The key vehicle for change and improvement is the roadmap for service improvement for disability services for children and young people. The implementation of this roadmap is well under way and will continue until 2026. The roadmap contains an important set of actions that collectively will enhance children's disability services in Ireland. They include significant measures to integrate and improve access to services, to expand the workforce and to advance better communication and engagement with families. A key part of this work has been the improvement of access to services through the CDNTs. These are providing supports and services to almost 45,000 children.

I fully acknowledge that there is still a lot more to do to address the current delays faced by children with disabilities who are seeking services. The latest data received from the HSE for the second quarter of 2025 show that there are currently 41 applications waiting one to three months, while there are 334 applications waiting longer than three months in the Cavan-Monaghan area, CHO 1.

Recruitment and retention of health and social care professionals, HSCPs, is the most significant challenge. Work is ongoing to increase staffing levels. The HSE data from April of this year shows there has been a nationwide increase of 26% in CDNT staffing levels since October 2023. Most significantly, the CDNT national vacancy rate has reduced from 29% in 2023 to 18% in 2025. This is a reduction of 11 percentage points.

Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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The Minister of State has outlined that 41 children have been waiting up to three months but, if I am correct, she also said that 334 are waiting over three months. The question itself was fairly specific in asking for more detail with regard to those figures. I wonder if the Minister of State has that data for three to six months, six to 12 months and over a year. From dealing with a number of families in Cavan and Monaghan, which are two distinct CDNTs, I know that in some cases the wait is inordinate, with difficulties in getting initial meetings and then difficulties in accessing occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and physiotherapy after that. In many ways the initial contact is just the beginning of a very hard journey the families have to go through. Does the Minister of State have more detail on those figures so that we can have a better sense of the delays that are there?

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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That is the breakdown I received but I will go back and see if there is a further breakdown. The Deputy's question was specific but those were the figures I got back. I will come back to the Deputy if there is a further breakdown.

My Department and I know that more needs to be done in this area. My Department is working with the HSE to introduce specific recruitment and retention measures and incentives for therapists to work in our CDNTs, including the CDNT sponsorship initiative and facilitating direct access for funded agencies to existing professional panels. In 2025, we allocated €10 million in additional funding to be made available specifically for children's services, and that funding focused on recruiting for various positions right across our CDNTs. That included 20 senior therapist posts, 20 staff-grade posts, 20 health and social care assistants posts and 15 clinical trainee posts. Measures have also been provided to assist with sustainability. That is to address the assessment of need backlog while freeing up resources for therapists to actually carry out the therapeutic supports.

Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I appreciate the Minister of State indicating that she would get that additional information. It might give her a sense of the challenges we have sometimes in actually getting information from the CDNTs. I thank the Minister of State for that and I note what she said with regard to staff recruitment and the need to recruit additional staff and fill vacancies. There is also a big piece of work to be done in retaining the staff that we have. I often comment that probably the most difficult job is for those staff operating within the CDNT, obviously in very stressed conditions. Naturally, they are probably getting the ire of the families who have waited a long time to get them.

In a follow-up or supplementary, could the Minister of State give an indication, if she has it, with regard to the number of vacancies that are currently outstanding in Cavan and Monaghan? The figures I have, dating back to spring of this year, show that in Monaghan there were just under ten outstanding vacancies and in Cavan, it was over 12. If the Minister of State has those up-to-date figures I would appreciate them, or, if not, she could follow up in writing with them.

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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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.