Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister for that. I accept her bona fides and accept that she is doing everything possible to increase the number of speech and language therapists. The issue here, however, is that this has been centralised and moved from the villages and the small towns. The Minister might say that is because of a lack of speech and language therapists. There are enough there at the moment to deliver the services. It will take the speech and language therapist, unless he or she is walking, only a short time to commute from one town to the other and provide the service locally, so this is an absurdity. If we had a map of Cavan here, and if you take the service out of the towns of Mullagh, Virginia, Bailieborough and Shercock and move it to Cootehill, Ballyconnell and Cavan, we would see there is no logic to this, only disturbing parents. I take the point about domiciliary care for adults, but this is no good to children. It is right that that is there for adults, and of course I am in favour of it, but for children this does not deal with it. A child in Shercock or Bailieborough, say, where I live so it is easier for me to talk about it, will now spend four or five hours of a day going to Cavan town for a service. They are taken out of the primary school, the parents are discommoded and other children suffer. It is madness. I ask the Minister personally to look at this specifically because this does not arise from a lack of speech and language therapists. Of course we need more of them, but there is no logic to this. The speech and language therapists can commute in 20 or 25 minutes from, say, Bailieborough to Cavan in a car. The parents take four hours, and there are multiple parents. It is crazy stuff. I ask the Minister to look at it.