Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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The Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, is welcome back to the House.

Joanne Collins (Sinn Fein)
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I highlight a deeply concerning gap in supports for children with disabilities, particularly around the availability of summer services and structured activities during school holidays. I am not speaking about July provision or anything within schools. In recent years, Enable Ireland and other service providers secured places within private summer camps to enable children with special and additional needs to join and have a chance to attend. These are not just social outings; they are crucial developmental and support-based spaces for children and their families.

This year, I was contacted by two families in Kilmallock, County Limerick, and inquired on their behalf. Unfortunately, there are no places because Enable Ireland does not have sufficient staffing numbers to send staff to these private summer camps and, as a result, the safeguards necessary for these children to attend would not be in place. These two families are distraught. Not only would they have had to travel all the way to UL in Limerick city to access these summer camps, as there are no services in the county, they now do not even have that option. These children's option to have the same access as their peers and experience the same summer as their peers is being taken away. It is not an affordability issue anymore. Some families may not be able to afford to send their children to summer camp but, for these families, regardless how much money they have, they do not have the option for their children to have the same experience as their peers during the summer. Some of these children are of secondary school age and might not suit all summer camps. As we know, just because children with additional needs and disabilities turn 13, that does not mean their disability or need is gone.They still have the same needs and disabilities and they would still like to enjoy the different activities that the mainstream students have on offer. They have an offer of multiple camps on multiple weeks throughout the summer, whereas these children would have had that one week in a private camp which now, due to lack of staffing through Enable Ireland and other service providers, will not be an option. I ask the Minister of State to look at services in the county, not just city based, and outside of July provision and the mainstream services that go hand-in-hand with the school. Is there an initiative we are looking at for these children to have what their peers are getting in order for them to feel like they are getting the same experiences?

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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I thank Senator Collins for raising this important issue and for offering me the opportunity to respond.

Summer services, such as summer camps, fall under the bracket of what we term "alternative respite". We often forget that respite can take many forms, such as overnights in a respite facility or another person’s home, additional support during the regular day such as afterschool or holiday programmes, or in-home support. As Minister for State with responsibility for disability, I know the importance of providing respite for people with disabilities and their families. For a disabled person, respite can be an opportunity to take part in afterschool or weekend activities with their peers, while for some carers the focus is on getting some much-needed help and relief in caring for a loved one.

I take this opportunity to stress that provision of respite is a key priority area, both for me and the HSE, and the benefits of proper respite supports cannot be overstated. Respite services can play a crucial role in delaying or preventing moves into full-time residential placements and can be a very important factor in preventing carer burnout and family breakdowns. There has been significant focus on respite provision in recent years, and additional funding to expand respite services has been provided in successive budgets. Between 2021 and 2024, €35.7 million in new development funding was provided to respite. This has resulted in the provision of tens of thousands of new respite sessions. Summer camps, along with afterschool respite services, Saturday clubs and other community-based respite support activities, are recorded as day-only respite. From 2021 to 2024, day-only sessions increased nearly 400%, from 16,306 to 65,151.

In the national service plan for 2025, additional funding has been provided to increase the occupancy of existing respite capacity, where feasible, and alternative respite provision, including in-home respite support hours and group-based targeted measures such as summer camps and evening provision.

Ensuring that the disability sector is fully resourced is a key priority for the Government, which has been reflected in the programme for Government. While additional funding has been provided over successive budgets, it should be noted that the HSE is operating in a very competitive global market for healthcare talent, as the Senator is aware. There are significant shortages of qualified healthcare professionals across the globe. The HSE and the various lead agencies are experiencing ongoing challenges recruiting and retaining staff across a range of disciplines and grades. A dedicated disability workforce strategy will be developed by the HSE in 2025, to meet growing service demands and address recruitment and retention challenges across specialist disability services. To address the high staff vacancy rate during 2025 across all children disability services, the HSE is continuing to carry out sustained workforce recruitment and retention initiatives which include intensive recruitment efforts across the HSE, section 38 and section 39 organisations to onboard staff into vacant jobs. It has also broadened access to the HSE CareerHub portal, and has had active and sustained engagement with the employment market and students to improve the perception of and interest in working in children’s disability network teams, CDNTs, boosted by an increase in clinical placements in CDNTs and the development of pipeline initiatives to map relevant applicant pools directly into CDNT jobs.

To address resourcing challenges, the HSE resourcing strategy, Resourcing our Future, was launched in May 2023 to ensure a sufficient domestic supply of healthcare staff. That strategy is being implemented to maximise the resourcing and delivery of publicly funded health services for the future. We are doing recruitment drives internationally as well, to try to attract more staff into the services as well as into higher education, meaning putting them through our universities.

Joanne Collins (Sinn Fein)
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That all sounds amazing. The funding is desperately needed. I get the staffing issue. Would there be a way to alleviate that issue through special needs assistants that are qualifying and need to do a placement? Would it be an option to try to get their placement as a summer camp? Similarly, special education teachers who are qualified and vetted need to do some training or placement. Could we look at giving something like that to this service so they are not just going into a classroom and are not just doing their placement and ticking a box, but are actually bringing another service into the system whereby they are supplying a summer camp for these children? That would mean they would be getting their placement and the children would be getting a benefit from it outside of school. It is something that we were thinking could be looked at to kill two birds with one stone.

Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Senator. To be quite frank, my door is open to all suggestions. When I was in education, many of the problems around the summer programme within the schools related to teacher burnout or people needing a break. We were looking at therapists or student teachers, for example, coming into the school setting and being able to provide the service if the school staff are not available. If the Senator has any suggestions, I ask her to please relay them. The big elephant in the room is the shortage of supply of staff. We need to be innovative in how we do that and make sure the safeguards are there and the expertise is there. That is at the heart of what we want to provide. We are increasing the funding. We have bursaries and we have incentives for people to work within the disability service. There is outreach to secondary schools for raising awareness about the importance and value of working within the disability sector and incentivising people to work and to retain staff within our CDNTs. Any suggestions are welcome.