THE LACK of speech and language therapy services for people with an intellectual disability in the Republic has been sharply criticised.
Chief executive of Inclusion Ireland Deirdre Carroll said there was anecdotal evidence that children with an intellectual disability could be waiting up to a year for the therapy and adults with a disability could be waiting even longer.
She added that while the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern seemed to indicate recently that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had the money it needs to appoint extra speech and language therapists, there was no evidence of them being appointed and the situation needed to be clarified. She also said the filling of extra speech and language therapy posts this year would now have to happen within the HSE's tighter employment control framework.
"It appears that disability services will suffer due to overruns within the general HSE budget," she said. "Inclusion Ireland campaigned vigorously for a clause in the Disability Act to ensure that money for disability services be ring-fenced. This was rejected and people with disabilities are now paying the price."
Ms Carroll warned the HSE it had a statutory duty under the Disability Act to provide an assessment of needs to children under five years of age within three months of an application for such an assessment being lodged.
She said these assessments should be independent but assessments now being offered were not always independent of the services the children were already attending.
When the case of a five-year-old boy facing a two-year wait for speech and language therapy was highlighted in January by Fine Gael TD Seán Barrett, a HSE spokesman said three additional speech and language therapy schools were established in 2003 in Limerick, Cork and Galway to address shortages.
He added that the number of speech and language therapists employed by the HSE had "considerably increased" between 2002 and September 2007.