Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Clonan. Unfortunately, due to his experience and Eoghan's experience, he has articulated what is horrific and what we all agree is horrific. I was party to the Joint Committee on Disability Matters report and the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth report on the AONs, and it outlines all of the things we need to do. Deputy Rabbitte is an exceptional Minister of State. Working with her has been a great privilege of mine and I hope we will continue to do that for some time to come. My only regret is that she is not at the Cabinet table and that her role is a Ministry of State. It should be a full Cabinet position and that is where I stand on it.

I support the Bill but I agree with Senator McGreehan that passing the Bill will not change anything immediately. It will in principle but not in practice and a lot of the problem is in practice. I head up a policy group within my party that looks at early intervention and what the obstacles have been. We have been carrying out an analysis and process to try to identify what we can practically do. When we look at the vacancy rates, they are extraordinary across all the CDNTs. We have 19,000 special needs assistants, SNAs, across the country and we have people who already have a competence in working with young people within our schools. We have over 1,135,000 therapy hours delivered across 91 network teams throughout the country so there is no question that where it works it works, but we had a vacancy rate of 33% at one point in this year.

Therefore a group of us set about seeing what we could do about that. I was not going to come and annoy the Minister of State but I thought I would go and annoy my Ministers and Ministers of State and see what they can do in assisting the Minister of State to deliver what she needs to do. In that, one of things is that we have SNAs who have great competence so what if we could upskill them? They are already in schools, they are already beside young people and they already have a passion for young people. If we could do that, would that not be great? I have put a call to the Minister, Deputy Harris, to put out an expression of interest in the same way that he did with the vets. I have asked him to look at that and put out a call to ascertain the number of college places that could be created across the country. We must look at where we could do a technician grade course and where we could expand that provision. I acknowledge that it is a couple of years away before that would be implemented but that is something I have already spoken to our Ministers about and I have said that we have to deliver this. Then we did an analysis of the therapists who are in place and how many hours of therapy they are delivering. It is as low as 11 hours in a week on a full-time basis.

Part of that is administration. Part of my call in the pre-budget submissions is to say we should make sure everybody has all of the computers or whatever is needed to ease that. We have administrative positions that could take some of that burden. Then I met Inchicore College of Further Education, which runs technical courses, and it said it has the scope to expand the technician places. It already has modules within the SNA training that are perfectly adaptable. People in preschool or school can identify and do AONs and they are competent and qualified to assess children and this prevents children needing the long AON. These children should be diverted off as quickly as possible and then we should make sure we have all the supports. The Minister of State came in here and spoke powerfully about all of the technological supports we could put in place for children and about her vision for that. Let us make sure the Minister of State is supported in rolling all of that out and in making sure that is in place.

Other things I am calling for within that group include an expansion of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF. Why are we not adapting that, dealing with it and providing therapy hours? Then you hit the concrete wall of CORU. While I respect its independence and its need for that, the speed at which it operates is a disgrace. We need to have psychologists and all of these professions accredited, outside of just those who are in the HSE, so that the NTPF can work, and work at a faster pace, and so it can support all that is being done and all that needs to be done. We have to move quickly and decisively. My fear is that while we can increase the number of college places and have more OTs and more members of all the professions involved here, that is three, four or five years way and many developmental windows will be missed as a consequence. We must move decisively and act quickly on the NTPF and so on. We could provide nurses in all of our schools. That would be another way of doing this and it has been another measure I have been calling for. We could have either play therapists or nurses within the school system. There are many nurses who cannot work hospital hours and have various family commitments but who could work school terms. They could provide all that is needed at local level. Those are the sorts of supports that are needed.

I thank the Minister of State and Senator Clonan. It is very good that we are discussing this matter.