Government ignoring 'uncomfortable truths' on children's disability therapies - Mayo TD
MAYO Aontú TD Paul Lawless has accused the government of ignoring uncomfortable truths by not collecting county-based data around waiting times for children's disability services.
Deputy Lawless has said the government’s response to his Parliamentary Question on children’s disability therapies exposes not a reforming system, but one that prefers 'comfortable ignorance to uncomfortable truths'.
The minister has confirmed that the government does not collect or publish average waiting times for speech and language therapy, occupational therapy or physiotherapy by county, he explained.
Said Deputy Lawless: “This is not a technical oversight. It is a political choice.
“The government cannot say how long children are waiting, where delays are worst, or which communities are being failed. A department that refuses to gather such basic information has already decided to remain comfortably removed from solving the problem.
“You cannot fix what you refuse to measure.”
He said this lack of data fatally undermines repeated claims of progress.
“The minister speaks of reform, yet cannot answer the simplest question any parent asks: how long will my child wait? Families are not being managed through a system - they are being lost in it.”
Deputy Lawless added: “There is something genuinely chilling about a State that funds therapy services for vulnerable children but will not count the days those children spend waiting. To refuse to measure waiting times by county is to refuse to look families in the eye. It is governance by blindfold.
“In any other area of public life - policing, housing, or hospital care - such an absence of basic data would cause outrage. When it comes to children with disabilities, it is treated as an administrative detail. That should horrify us.”
The reply also confirms 445 vacant therapy posts nationally, almost one in five, with no regional or county breakdown.
“We are told there is a staffing crisis, but not where it is biting. Shortages exist, but apparently not on any chart the government is willing to publish. That is not transparency; it is institutional shrugging.”
While the minister points to a reduction in the national waiting list, over 10,000 children are still waiting, many for first contact.
Deputy Lawless said: “When the government boasts of falling numbers, a basic question goes unanswered: are children leaving the list because they are finally being treated or because they are turning 18 and ageing out of a system that failed them? And if the department cannot tell us waiting times by county, one is entitled to ask whether it even tracks that distinction at all.”
He added: “A waiting list that shrinks because childhood has expired is not a success. It is a quiet indictment.”
He concluded: “Parents are doing everything asked of them while critical early years drain away. What they receive in return is evasion dressed up as progress.
“Until this Government is willing to fully know this problem - to map it, measure it, and publish it - it has no moral authority to claim it is fixing it. Families are not asking for spin, projections or comfort words. They are asking for honesty, urgency and a State finally brave enough to confront the truth it has spent too long avoiding.”