The determination and commitment of a 14-year-old disability rights activist has once again embarrassed the Government over its inability to implement its own disability legislation.
The law currently requires that the State provides a child with a disability with a formal statement of their needs within six months of making an application. The target is being missed by a country mile. There are currently 15,000 waiting for more than six months and the number is due to reach 25,000 by the end of the year.
A similar campaign by Cara Darmody – who this week staged a 50-hour picket outside Leinster House – led to a commitment by the Government last year of an additional €10 million to the budget for assessments.
This time the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and the Minister for Children and Disabilities, Norma Foley, have made a commitment to make unspecified changes in the law which should speed up the assessment process. The Government has also committed to training and recruiting more therapists, saying that money would not be a barrier to reforms.
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If these commitments are met the result should be an improvement in the time taken to carry out assessments. Ensuring that the quality of the assessments do not suffer will be a challenge. But surely not an insurmountable one.
The bigger and arguably more difficult challenge will be to ensure the delivery of the services required by the assessment of needs. The organisations that provide many of these services on behalf of the health service say that they are in crisis.
The heads of 36 voluntary disability services providers have written to the chief executive of the Health Service Executive, Bernard Gloster, warning of an “an extreme risk” to their ability to expand services or, in many cases, sustain existing operations.
They say that funding has not kept up with increases in wages and other non-pay costs such as electricity.
Several of them have said that they are on the verge of bankruptcy and should by law cease or curtail the services they offer to some 80,000 people with disabilities.
The fact that so many disability services providers find themselves in this situation, despite the budget for specialist disability services having grown by €1.6 billion since 2020 to over €3.2 billion a year, is worrying.
It reflects the difficulty that Ireland and other countries that have publicly-funded health and welfare systems face in getting out in front of demographic trends, such as population growth and increasing longevity.
Making politically expedient promises to avoid negative publicity is the easy part. Delivering on them is another matter.
