Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will begin where the Acting Chair left off. I concur with her remarks about my colleague Senator Carrigy who has taken this as his personal crusade in his first term in the Seanad. It is truly impressive that he has achieved so much in this area in one term. I know he is particularly committed to it. His achievements are mammoth and I congratulate him on that. I am certainly proud to be a colleague of his.

I welcome the Minister of State. I have been at meetings with her with a number of groups - I will come to some of that in a minute - and I acknowledge her absolute commitment to getting this right. Nobody can detract from that. That is the fundamental starting point and I commend her on that. I also join the Acting Chairperson in welcoming the representatives from AsIAm in the Gallery. It is good to have them here as particularly concerned central stakeholders. I acknowledge that the Taoiseach has set up a special Cabinet sub-committee to recognise people of different abilities and to see that something is done to support people of all diverse abilities.

Obviously, the staffing level is a major issue and I will be very interested to hear the Minister of State's responses here. I will be parochial, but I will only visit the parochial to make a general point. Our local CDNT is based in Enable Ireland in Rathcorick, County Cavan. The Minister of State has been there in my company and I have subsequently met her with groups from there. She can correct me if I am wrong, but this is on reports to the parents forum. There are 14 vacancies for professionals there, which is a significant number. With 520 children, the parents would argue, some people would say in excess of 400, at the moment in our local one in Cavan - this replicates itself nationally - there are two physios, two speech and language therapists, five occupational therapists, no psychologist and a half-time social worker. The social worker matters to the parents. In total, including various support workers, ancillary staff etc., there are 17 staff with that number in Rathcorick, County Cavan. There are currently 14 vacancies.

Regarding the 14 vacancies, what are the Government's proposals for a feeder system so that the professionals will become available? How do we make working here more attractive? How do we bridge the final divide between the section 39 workers and the HSE workers? How do we smooth that one out? What do we do here? We do not want to get too lateral here. However, I think that housing is an issue in attracting professionals to come here and stay here. There is potential to create local purpose-built accommodation for young people where institutions have available land. Certainly this should be done on hospital sites for student nurses. It was done for generations and could work. We need to be imaginative. Of course, we need to go on solving the housing problem as an holistic issue. I ask the Minister of State for her opinion on the housing problem as it is relevant to this question. Is there anything we could do to make it attractive for professionals to come here?

There is also an issue with retention of professionals. There is considerable attrition. I am not sure that there is enough assessment of why they leave. The technical term for this evaluation is an exit poll. I had only understood that to be to do with elections. However, I gather an exit poll is where professionals are asked why they are leaving and that is analysed to try to address that. Staffing is a major issue. I would like the Minister of State to respond on staffing in the particular - the instance I have raised - and as a general issue.

I mentioned section 39 workers. I want to mention the assessments. If I understand it correctly, the waiting lists have improved somewhat. However if my information is correct - I would be delighted to be proven wrong because nobody wants to be right about this stuff - people are still waiting between six and ten months for an assessment, which is too long, and only the rich can access them privately. Senator Carrigy said one of the recommendations of the report was to provide money to help people to access assessments privately and supplement maybe. We need to look at imaginative responses there.

I will finish with this because my time is restricted. I find the primary school units for autism brilliant. I am a former primary teacher and I go to the openings of these units, sensory rooms and so on. They are extraordinarily good and effective. We also need those at second level. We have some at second level and then we need the-----