Sir, – I find the generalised HSE and Government response to the crisis created by the removal of dedicated funding for school-leavers with intellectual disabilities perplexing.
I can only assume that it is most probably due to a mix of ignorance and a blind fear of spending given the state of our country.
People with intellectual disabilities are wholly dependent on all of us for their day to day existence. If they are left to wait at home in some kind of existential limbo for the dawn of a promised new era of more efficient and effectively delivered services their lives and the lives of those caring for them will become unbearable and deteriorate rapidly.
As a family of a wonderful 18-year-old young man, faced with just such a future, we despair to once again find ourselves stuck between the grinding rhetoric of politicians and health officials on the one hand and the defensive riposte of the embattled service providers on the other.
The numerous references to a utopian future when budgets will be individualised to a person’s needs and there will be transparency of spending is particularly perplexing in that it is set up as something that can only appear to exist in the future.
The 700 or so school-leavers with intellectual disabilities will this year have their needs assessed awaiting news of whether a day occupational service will be forthcoming for them. There is no better opportunity to practise individualised funding; there is no obstacle to this other than a willingness to spend the money. What better way to gradually reform a system than at the point of entry to that system?
It is time to stop the empty rhetoric and act; it is not a time to cut the life line from under a generation of vulnerable people and their families. – Yours, etc,