I agree with the Deputy that it is absolutely unacceptable that a young child in these circumstances, Tiernan Power Murphy, should be denied urgent oral healthcare and dental healthcare in terms of the extraction of teeth. The fact that we are dealing with the condition of autism as well exacerbates the unacceptable nature of this. The Minister of State, Deputy Mary Butler, has been in touch with and spoken to the HSE. The HSE, I understand, is engaging with the family on this and a solution will be found immediately in respect of this specific case, as it should be. I believe the regional executive officer has acted on this. My understanding is the case was not elevated to the regional executive officer. That does not take away from the broader issue of oral healthcare, dental healthcare and orthodontics more generally. This has been an issue in engagement between the Department and the Irish Dental Association for quite some time. Initiatives were taken last year in respect of endeavouring to break logjams. Over €200 million is now invested annually in the provision of oral healthcare. I believe that when such large sums of money are now allocated to various services, and I am saying this from the Government's perspective, this is not a resource issue. There are fundamental issues within dentistry - I accept that - but within services, when large-scale allocations are being made, the idea that situations such as this cannot be resolved is not acceptable. There has to be a more responsive approach. I will be talking to the chief executive officer of the HSE in respect of this. To be fair to him, he endeavours to be solutions-driven in resolving cases of this kind. Very often when children have special needs, the additional needs compound the condition and the experience for the child in terms of the particular issue he or she may have, in this case, the necessity to extract three teeth and the child being in extraordinary pain on an ongoing basis. These issues should be elevated and resolved. There are enough resources to resolve them. The broader issue also needs to be resolved. Go bunúsach, tá an-chuid anois á caitheamh ó thaobh caiteachais ag an Rialtas ar chúrsaí oideachais, ar chúrsaí sláinte agus go háirithe i gcomhthéacs leanaí le gánna speisialta agus breise. Tá an-chuid airgid ann anois. Caithfimid agus caithfidh an córas bheith in ann cásanna den saghas seo a réiteach agus a réiteach go tapaidh. More generally, if the Deputy looks, for example, at the education budget now, which is quite substantial, 25% of it is allocated to special education. The general situation is changing in terms of the growth as a percentage of population of people with disabilities more generally. In terms of children, the 2016 and 2022 censuses show there has been a very significant increase in the number of people presenting with disabilities or conditions that reduce capacity. It is quite an extraordinary increase in terms of the general population. It is also quite significant in terms of children. That means we have to ramp up significantly expenditure and resources, which we have. If the Deputy looks at special education alone, the number of extra classes and extra teachers is quite significant compared to two or three years ago.
Sentiment score: 0.20
No, sorry. I did not-----
Sentiment score: -0.18
More broadly, as I said earlier, the Minister of State, Deputy Mary Butler, has been involved in this case and has spoken to the regional executive officer. As I have already said, prior to this being raised, the HSE has acted and has advised the Minister of State. The Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, has also been in touch with the HSE. The family have been advised-----
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-----by the HSE that this matter will be resolved. In this specific case, the intervention has happened and the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, has been advised that it will be resolved. I will discuss the broader issue with the Minister for Health and the chief executive officer of the HSE in terms of cases involved, such as this one, and, more broadly, in terms of the broader dental situation and children with additional needs.
Sentiment score: 0.13
The bottom line is that the State has intervened very strongly and assertively in the housing market. The State is the main player, I would argue, in the housing market right now in terms of the level of State investment. That is increasing and has increased over the last number of years. As I said yesterday, we are at record levels of social housing new builds compared with the last three decades. The Deputy can go back and compare and contrast. We need to get that figure of 8,000-plus to about 10,000 new builds and add about 2,000 more in terms of leasing to deal with homelessness cases and new acquisitions. The Deputy keeps saying things we have not said. I never said that we wanted to increase rents or end the RPZs. I challenged her last week to produce a quote where I said I would end RPZs and of course she cannot find one because it does not exist. I am struck by the degree to which the debate gets so easily distorted by commentary in the public sphere. It is interesting. There seems to be no space to tease out and discuss issues without the immediate assertion, allegation or branding of a comment into a nice box that fits the political slogans and so on but does not add any solutions to anything. The real debate in the election was how to get to 50,000 units per annum because every party accepted the figure of 50,000 that the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, says we need. The Labour Party came forward with the national housing construction agency with very little detail on it. Even when I met it subsequently in the context of Government formation, there was very little detail on it. There was no paper or document. It seemed to go back to the direct labour approach. The Labour Party seemed to envisage a national construction agency that would employ thousands of people to build homes. That is not feasible in the current era. It will not happen and it would delay the process of house building even further. The Labour Party had further ideas around the LDA, which were unspecified. It took two years to legislate for the LDA. My argument during the election debate with Deputy Bacik was quite simply that all of that would delay and disrupt the momentum of trying to get more houses built. We need more houses to be built. We need to get the existing agencies, local authorities, approved housing bodies and the LDA working and not be formulating new schemes and agencies which, by definition, all takes time. That was the Labour Party proposition. For example, the Deputy made comments about my statement about getting private sector investment in. It is like performance arts in here. One would imagine I had said something terrible when I said we need to get private sector investment in.
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I can come back.
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What does that mean?
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Come on.
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A few people tried that.
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Actually the State is involved in the apartment building area at huge cost and a genuine debate would ask whether there are better ways of doing it. I do not know what the Deputy means by turning the LDA into a genuine vehicle, as though it is not genuine now. However, when I indicated last week, as everyone outside agrees, that we need private sector investment-----
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Most economic people and experts in housing are saying it.
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The Deputy attacks people for mentioning it. She moves straight to tax breaks. She might benefit from looking at the history of her party on this. I quote: We are creating this process for bringing in private investment. I hope to launch a new scheme in relation to investment in social housing in the near future, a new process for bringing in investors. Can we guess who said that when he was Minister for housing? It was Deputy Bacik's current colleague and former party leader, Deputy Kelly-----
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-----back in the day when AK47 was firing on all cylinders.
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When I mentioned it last week-----
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-----there was outrage and hyperbole.
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No, this was before the 2016 election.
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Do not get tetchy, Alan.
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I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I accept fully that the journey of parents of children with special needs is an extremely challenging, difficult and traumatic one. They simply have to fight too hard and too long for access to services and in some cases, though not all, for education and access to school places. It is my objective as Taoiseach to change this story and it is a key priority of mine, along with housing and child poverty. They are the key priorities of my term as Taoiseach and of the wider Government. I am establishing a disability unit in the Department of the Taoiseach. We had our first meeting with about eight Ministers earlier this week and a disability Cabinet subcommittee will follow. All Ministers are clear that there must be a whole-of-government response to the issue of disability more generally - it is wide - with a particular focus on children in education and then on assessment of needs and, more critically, access to therapy services. In the first instance, we must deal with the assessment of needs issue. The 2022 High Court judgment of Ms Justice Phelan in the case of C.T.M. (a minor) v HSE has created a situation where there are huge resources and backlog in the area of assessment of needs. The Deputy is correct that the number is 14,000. That is not tenable. Legislation has to be brought in to deal with this. That will happen and there will be engagement with the House on it. We have to get the right balance of existing resources to the services and the provision of services. You do not have to get an assessment of need to avail of services. You should have an entitlement to services even when awaiting the assessment of need. The Minister for Education is developing proposals for a school-based therapy service beginning in special schools. This was a commitment we made in the programme for Government which we are going to see through. The CDNTs and HSE are continuing to recruit across the 93 CDNTs. The current recruitment campaign has issued about 145 job offers across key therapy roles. Progress is slow. There was a 17% increase in staff from 2023 to 2024 and another 111 are expected to join soon. The vacancy rate has dropped by 7.9% to 21%, but none of that is enough. It is not adequate.
Sentiment score: 0.11
There will be a relentless focus on this for the lifetime of this Government.
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I will come back on the situation on the CDNTs. That recruitment continues. On education, it should be acknowledged that there has been a huge increase in public expenditure, and rightly so, on special education. It now constitutes 25% of the overall education budget, or about €3 billion now. Money, however, does not mean a whole lot to people if they are waiting for school places. We have some 23,000 special needs assistants now in our schools. We have 20,800 special education teachers. The number of special classes has doubled in the last five years to 3,336, serving 20,000 students, and 11 new special schools have been established, with five more planned for this school year 2025-26. With regard to the September deadline, the Minister for Education is clear that we want to ensure all children get a place by September. Working with the NCSE, we will focus very strongly on that. On the education side, there has been significant progress over the last number of years. We just have to make sure that the system is almost automatic in that children or their parents should not have to be under pressure in trying to secure a place for their child.
Sentiment score: 0.35
I will start by acknowledging the work the Deputy did when he was the Minister responsible for this area in the last Government for close to five years. I hope he acknowledges the commitment of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties, with the Green Party, to the issue of childcare during the last Government when it dealt substantially with pay and conditions and money was allocated to successive Ministers for public expenditure in respect of the agreement with the trade unions on pay and conditions. The unions acknowledged that at the time. There was the freeze on increases in the cost of childcare and there was very significant investment in childcare itself. It struck me that when Members are in opposition they talk very nobly and are principled about the public childcare system, but I do not see great models. I remember talking to the Social Democrats about this in our preliminary meeting. There was no detail. I remember people saying to me that it would be done gradually, on a phased basis, and that an inventory or audit must be done first. The problem is that it is a bit more complex than that. We can all commit to a public model but if one is committing to that, there is an obligation to outline it. What would we do with community play groups? Would the State take them over? Would the State take over the private sector provision? It could be done in a different way. It could be done with special needs first and children with additional needs. There have been Green Papers as far back as the late 1990s suggesting that the State and the Department of Education should be more involved in the provision of early-based education for children with special needs. The Department did get involved in the syllabus, the curriculum, Síolta and all of that, as well as other aspects. There is an onus. It is great to make the great announcement but, with respect, the Deputy was in government for the last four and a half years. No model came forward to me about a public model for childcare because the Deputy had to deal with the realities - the fiscal reality and budget realities. As Minister, he made a lot of progress in respect of childcare, as we all did collectively, but we need to do an awful lot more. A fundamental call needs to be made. How do we deal with the existing structures? Fianna Fáil created the ECCE scheme at the time and it has been expanded. The childcare model has evolved from when it was originally in the Department of Justice through the NOW programme. It has been expanded dramatically through childcare county committees and through different iterations. It is now in the Department of children. To be frank, the answer as regards increased resources, increased expansion of places and more resources to try to decrease the cost to parents is "Yes".
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The immediate issue is primarily the allocation of resources and also working through what we mean by public health model and how we integrate it with the school-based model for children from the age of four and a half or four years upwards. That is the big question. We then have to ask about the funding implications of that and identify how much would it cost and how we would plan, in terms of the overall allocation of resources, to give effect to it. That is work that can be done. It could usefully be done by an Oireachtas committee in respect of childcare, just like we did in terms of healthcare and other areas in the past. It needs a fairly detailed analysis and engagement with all of the stakeholders in the area of childcare. We can create legal rights and constitutional rights, but, fundamentally, the real meat is in the provision of resources, with structures and systems that give the desired outcome of access to childcare places for everybody who requires it.
Sentiment score: 0.26