My question concerns the issue of pre-school and post-school therapeutic services for children with additional needs. It is a subject on which this Government has made great strides in the last number of years. Many parents in Dublin South-West have specifically raised the costs of paying for these invaluable therapeutic interventions because very often they have to pay for them privately. Those kinds of therapeutic interventions include play therapy, art therapy, sports therapy and animal therapy. Indeed, a group of teenage students from Tallaght Community School was in the House last week. One of them spoke specifically about how invaluable some of those therapies were to his development. There is a cost, however, which is the issue I am raising. The State is not yet covering these costs. What plans does the Government have to introduce or allocate funding that would assist parents of children with special needs to pay for these therapies?

I am not aware of any plans to cover those costs at the moment. It is not standard that we would cover the costs of private healthcare or private treatments. Sometimes we do this through the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, mechanism, for example through the cross-Border directive. If there is a prior arrangement, we can do this but we must have some checks and controls around these things. Perhaps we can give consideration to using that mechanism to pay for some people to go private in those circumstances. We would have to be careful to get that right, however, and ensure the right treatments are definitely needed and registered and all those things, which can be quite complicated.