Sinn Féin TD for Dublin South West Seán Crowe has said that the government broke the children’s disability services and no one believes that they are capable of fixing them.

Speaking during a Sinn Féin motion on the Assessment of Need crisis in the Dáil last night, Teachta Crowe said:

“At the start of October, there were more than 8,000 children waiting on assessments of need in the CHO7 area. Almost 1,600 of those children have been waiting more than two years to be seen. There are almost twice as many children waiting in one area alone than there have been assessments carried out State-wide so far this year.

“The waiting list to access services in the CDNT in Chamber House in Tallaght is now more than 56 months, or almost five years. I met Katherine Zappone in 2016 while going into Chamber House to try to find out what was wrong. At that time, the assessment was that the team was missing key personnel. Nine years on, they’re still missing those key personnel.

“Parents are being forced to find spaces and go down the extremely expensive private services route. The Government has become so used to relying on private healthcare to pick up the slack that it has forgotten that not everyone can afford to go private and there is limited capacity in the private system.

“It is a broken system that is contributing, in many cases, to broken families. Thousands of children in just one area are spending their childhoods waiting and waiting for assessments so that they can access speech and language or occupational therapies.

“This is wrong. The system is broken. It needs to be fixed.”