This is Ireland’s first Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Its purpose is to celebrate and raise awareness of the different ways those who are neurodiverse experience and interact with the world around them. Neurodiverse conditions include autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, to name just a few. With the growing waiting list to access supports, we are clearly not doing enough to support those who are neurodiverse. In Roscommon and Galway there are more than 500 children waiting for physiotherapy appointments. In January, more than 1,000 children across the two counties were awaiting initial speech and language therapy assessments and nearly 500 were awaiting occupational therapy assessments. This is simply not good enough. We have to do better. Parents are being left with no option but to seek services privately, if they are lucky enough to have the resources to do so or to be able to source them. What about families who cannot access such interventions? They are at the mercy of ever-growing waiting lists.

I am sure the Deputy is aware that the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, is doing major work in this area and will be bringing forward an autism innovation strategy to respond to the diversity that the Deputy has outlined there, particularly among younger children. The issue the Deputy has raised on waiting lists is the reason the Government has made a significant commitment to try to increase the number of people working within our health services at the moment, especially in the areas of therapy. More than €5 billion in additional funding has been made available to the Department of Health in recent years. I know the Department is working hard to recruit the therapists who, as the Deputy knows, are badly needed and who could make a very big difference to those who access their services and need their care.