By far the hardest conversations I have with constituents are the ones struggling with disability services for their children. I knock on the door and it opens, sometimes with their dependent adult child with an intellectual disability by their side. You can see the difficulty etched into the faces of those who care so deeply for those vulnerable family relatives and their despair with the State that continues to fail them so badly. During my first elections, the local elections in 2024, I remember meeting the older sister, Lynn, who takes care of her brother while working full time in the Civil Service. She was deeply frustrated by a State that she works for that lets her brother down every day. When I first knocked on her door, she asked me what the State and I would do for her brother. She was clearly exhausted, clearly at her wit's end of interacting with the State that seemed to care about everything but her family. I told her I would do my best, as I hope I am now. Months later, during the general election, I knocked on a door an Kieran and his son, Daniel, answered. Kieran told me that it was his wife, Mary, who makes the decisions on who they vote for. No wonder, because she has been fighting for decades for her son for services. Most recently, I fought alongside her for an adult drama programme to be continued for Daniel. Even in basic activities, these parents have to fight for everything. This week I spoke to Katy and Felim, who care for their adult daughter, Ellie. Katy made an excellent point to me. The State has known about her daughter Ellie for the whole 26 years of her life, but at no point has any service thought to plan for her adulthood or independence. She said to me she had no faith in services at all, or in the quality of care and support Ellie would get, and that they had little understanding of her personal situation, her needs, or her wants or her dreams. Ellie is looking for the simple things in life - home, family, support, community and things to do - yet these simplicities seem too complicated for the State to grapple with. Across all of these stories, the difficulty is mirrored almost exactly from family to family. It should not come to this. For each of them, like the brave campaigners in the Before We Die campaign, they have had to bare their lives and souls to public representatives for their difficulty just to be heard. A total of 2,314 adult children with intellectual disabilities are cared for by parents over the age of 70. Thousands more are cared for by siblings, parents who are younger or extended families. All have been told, officially, that they have "an indefinite responsibility" to provide housing and care for the disabled person in their family. What a gross abdication of a responsibility by the State that was supposed to help and not to hinder. At the root of this is an exploitation of familial love. There is a cruelness in a system that ignores the needs of our most vulnerable, whether it is as simple as accessing housing or care, or an outsourcing of emergency care to a private sector motivated by profit over human dignity. This is not the way that we should govern. This is not the way our people should be treated. It is not the way any well-minded person would intend it to be. In speaking to these families, the same words come from their mouths. There is no planning, there is little understanding and they have no faith in a system that has let them down. Many are not in crisis, but too many are terrified to think of how that might change. Far too many are gripped by an existential dread, a cloud of anxiety hanging over their every living breath. We owe it to these families and adults to create a system that works for them. Our motion here clearly articulates how. I urge the Minister and the Government to support it or, at the very least, have the courage to acknowledge the problem and reimagine a system that treats every person in this situation with the dignity that they deserve. Anything less is an admission of failure. I ask the Minister not to fail. These people I meet are counting on her. The next time I knock on their doors, I will remind them of this day and of the Minister's inaction.

Sentiment score: 0.08