I want to say hello to Cara Darmody and her family. I begin by sending my solidarity to families waiting for an assessment for their child or children. At the start of October, there were more than 8,000 children waiting on assessments of need in the CHO 7 area. Almost 1,600 of those children have been waiting more than two years to be seen. There are almost twice as many children waiting in one area alone than there have been assessments carried out State-wide so far this year. There is a long wait to access support services once a child receives an assessment. The waiting list to access services in the CDNT in Chamber House in Tallaght is now more than 56 months, or almost five years. I met Katherine Zappone in 2016 while going into Chamber House to try to find out what was wrong. At that time, the assessment was that the team was missing key personnel. Would it surprise the Minister of State to hear that there are still missing key personnel in the team? Parents are being forced to find spaces and go down the extremely expensive private services route. The Government has become so used to relying on private healthcare to pick up the slack that it has forgotten that not everyone can afford to go private and there is limited capacity in the private system. During the debate, Deputies have spoken about a broken system. It is a broken system that is contributing, in many cases, to broken families. Thousands of children in just one area are spending their childhoods waiting and waiting for assessments so that they can access speech and language or occupational therapies. This is wrong. The system is broken. It needs to be fixed.

Sentiment score: -0.18