This issue relates to access to services for children with disabilities. The Government is utterly failing a generation of children with disabilities and their families. We can see this clearly in Dublin North-West, the area I represent. The children’s disability network teams, CDNTs, are under-resourced and there are unacceptable delays in assessments, with multi-year waiting lists for therapies. The teams fail to provide the vital and urgent care children and their families need. The failure to provide assessments of need is impacting on children’s ability to access other services, especially their access to education and preschool, primary school and secondary school places. This Friday, we will see parents, who are stressed up to their eyeballs, courageously holding a 24-hour sleep-out at the Department of Education because of the failure to provide special education school places. Figures provided by the HSE show that 14,221 applications for assessments of need nationally were overdue for completion by the end of last year. Almost one in four of those overdue assessments are in the area of community health organisation, CHO, 9, which includes my constituency. In this area, which comprises north Dublin, including areas like Ballymun, Finglas, Santry and Glasnevin, there were 3,193 overdue applications. Some 2,791 of the children to whom those cases relate had been waiting more than three months. Under the Disability Act, an assessment of need must be completed within six months. When it comes to CDNTs, the situation is just as bleak. The most recent data for the CHO 9 area showed 2,596 children waiting for an initial contact with a CDNT at the end of last year and almost 90% of those children had been waiting for more than one year. This is again the same area of north Dublin with the highest number of children waiting for more than 12 months for initial contact with a CDNT. This is unacceptable. I wish to highlight two cases that have been raised with me. The first concerns Jack who is six and who needs an autism class. He has been tossed around between primary care and a CDNT and has still not received an assessment of need, a diagnosis or therapy. He is six years old and has still not received a school place confirmed for the 2025-26 school year. This is the second year running that he has not received a place. I spoke to his mother, Susan, who explained the level of stress and anxiety that she and her family experience because of the lack of services and clarity around a school place. This situation is not acceptable. Noah, another child, is three years old. He is non-verbal and severely autistic. After initially having his referrals to the CDNT rejected, he was finally referred two years later only after an emotional appeal from his mother. In October 2024, Noah’s family had to secure legal representation to compel the HSE to complete his assessment of need. They are still waiting for that assessment. They were contacted by the HSE asking them to consent to an incomplete assessment of need, one without his report from the National Council for Special Education and with no forecast date for completion, which would render it effectively useless in securing a school placement. I wish to ask the Minister for children, disability and equality, Deputy Foley, what will she do to ensure that children like Jack and Noah and the thousands of other children in north Dublin have access to the therapies, support services and school places they need.

Sentiment score: 0.04

The response, while welcome, is inadequate. If we look at the situation facing these families, particularly the children, they cannot wait. They cannot be left waiting for months and years for access to basic services and assessments of need. Early intervention is absolutely key in this regard. These families are struggling. I have spoken to them and they have contacted me. I have met them during the election on the doors. The level of stress and anxiety that parents of children with additional needs, disabilities, autism or ADHD experience is unacceptable. Bringing it back to the children again, every day, week and month of delay in the context of intervention has long-term impacts on those children, reducing their potential and quality of life. We should not accept it. The Minister of State set out the ambition to, for example, introduce specific recruitment and retention initiatives and while they are badly needed, we need to see urgent action on them. We need staff numbers in CDNTs to be increased and therapies provided. Parents explain that just getting a contact and being told they can be part of a webinar or group workshop is not a service in terms of a therapy their children need. We cannot simply say that this is enough or that it is acceptable. The children and their families need it, so I am calling on the Government to put a greater focus on this and not accept these waiting lists as being tolerable.

Sentiment score: -0.09