John McGuinness Says Bill Will Not Fix Disability Services

What every parent wants to know is will this piece of legislation deal with the issues, deal with the specific timelines that will be put in place? Will it make it better? Will it make the assessment better? And I can't tell them that arising from this legislation. I'm happy to support legislation that will in any way deal with the waiting times for families and deal with the issues that they have in relation to assessments, access to therapists, OT, speech and language and physio and so on. But I don't see that in this bill. So let's not pretend that this bill is going to fix everything in terms of the care of those that need it. It is not. And then we have to ask the question, if it's not, where are the professionals that we need to deliver the services, to have the assessments carried out, to put in place all of the supports that are needed for the individuals that will require it. And there are so many other players out there in terms of the delivery of the service that are doing it and doing it to the best of their ability, but yet they're not being looked at by the Department can actually learn from them. So I'm going to give you the example of the SOS Sinclair Kenny. The principal individual there is Francis Coughlin. He has put forward his budgets year in year out. He's been left short. He is trying to innovate and move the services on within the community. He's trying to support the families and it's an excellent organisation. But every single year he and the families that he represents and the individuals that he provides the services for are being challenged by the state itself in terms of the delivery of the services that they need. So it is the state that is letting them down because it's not planning for the professionals to be employed, to be maintained in their jobs, and what they need is the pay that will keep them there, the structure that will allow them to work freely within the HSE or any other organisation and they're not getting that and that's perhaps why they're leaving the country and going elsewhere. I could point you to St. Patrick's Special School which again is delivering services way beyond what they what they should be doing and way beyond what they're being paid for doing and not being acknowledged. And I would encourage you Minister to visit the likes of those services, to go to Jonah Special School in Sleave Row and see what they're trying to do with limited resources and very successfully doing it. But requiring the state to intervene, to support them, to give them the money to develop a modern state of the art service housed in buildings that can accommodate the needs of those children. And we're not learning from those at the coalface that are doing this for individual children. Kings River in my constituency is another project that is doing fantastic work and it's been treated, in my opinion, very badly by the HSE. There is no planning in terms of the financing of capital programs or the financing of the services that they're delivering. So the staff are giving more and more of their time, not being paid for, just to make sure that their services are being delivered to the clients that they have. And how bad is that in terms of the reflection on the state? I think is absolutely scandalous. And the CD&T, the CAMHS, all of those that the organisations that the children get referred to, they're under enormous pressure. And as a result of that, the children and the families are being pushed from pillar to post and they're not getting the type of assessment that's required or supports that are needed in a structure that is heavily bureaucratic and is interested in nothing other than fulfilling a time frame or fulfilling a very limited scope in terms of the treatment of all of these cases. Neither do I see a plan in place to look after children as they go through their teenage years to young adults and to support the families in question. What is going to happen when parents die and move on? What's going to happen to those children? What plan is in place to look after them? Where are the services that are defined that they will need? They're not there. And I have seen, as I worked with the Down's Syndrome organisation in Kilkenny, where they too can't get services from the HSE, but yet when they get their funding, which you kindly assisted them with, they're able to buy the services privately. So in my opinion, it is the bureaucratic nature of the HSE that causes people to look beyond that service, where they can deliver a more streamlined service without the hindrance of the reporting mechanisms that are all there. So we should not pretend, we should not try and hide or cover the fact that we are failing children, forcing them to the courts, forcing families into the courts. We should not be doing that. Every single cent of funding should go directly to organisations that are delivering successfully the type of therapies and support services that are needed, not just for the individual concerned, but for the family also. And I have heard these debates over and over and over again and no results. I'm deeply disappointed with the system and deeply disappointed that there's not more in this Bill. Thank you.