The Government is running an advertising campaign to highlight the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It tells us that disability rights are human rights. It goes on to state, "Everyone in Ireland has a role in advancing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities." I really cannot imagine a more tone-deaf marketing slogan. That is all it is; a slogan. Disability rights are not rights people can exercise in Ireland. The only people who can do anything about advancing legal entitlements under the UN convention are the Taoiseach and his Government. The Government writes policy, has responsibility for providing services, allocates funding, sets recruitment targets and controls capacity. It is the Government's job to ensure no child is left behind and that every child has access to a timely assessment of need, appropriate services and educational supports.

The Government is failing on all counts. I should not need to remind the Taoiseach that disability services are on their knees. Rights are entirely notional. They exist on paper and in Government advertising jingles but not in reality. A total of 16,522 children are currently waiting for their first appointment with children's disability network teams. More than 10,000 of them have been waiting for over a year, with no intervention and no therapy. More than one third of posts in children's disability network teams are vacant. In some teams, vacancy rates are more than 60%. Because of this, some children wait for years for any supports at all. Then the parents of those children turn on the radio and hear they are responsible for advancing rights under the convention. It really is disgraceful.

What was left out of the Government's advertising campaign is that it has not signed up to the part of the convention that would actually allow people to exercise their rights. The programme for Government commits to signing and ratifying the optional protocol to the convention. We are three years into the Government's term and we do not have a date for ratification. Ratifying the optional protocol would enable disabled people to make complaints to the UN about breaches of their rights under the convention.

To make matters even worse, in response to my parliamentary question - I could not actually believe my eyes - the Minister informed me that the Government has spent €1.5 million on this essentially false advertising campaign. To put that €1.5 million in perspective, the Government allocated just €64 million in the budget for additional disability services. Meanwhile, the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, recently published a road map for children's disability services that is increasingly looking like it will be the road to nowhere with no additional budget. Does the Taoiseach accept that the Government has responsibility for ensuring people's rights under the convention? When will the Government ratify the optional protocol? When will the road map for disability services get a budget?

I thank Deputy Cairns for raising this important question. It was during my first term as Taoiseach that we ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. We are not a country that just ratifies a convention and then moves on. We are a country that makes sure we have done what we need to do before we ratify a convention and that is what we did on this occasion. It was not straightforward but we got it done. I want to acknowledge in particular the work of the former Deputy Finian McGrath, as Minister of State with responsibility for disability during that Government, on leading the charge to make sure we ratified that convention, which we did.

On disability services, I know there are a lot of shortcomings. I would not deny that for a second. In some areas we have made a lot of progress, and particularly in education. Take for example the whole area of special education. There are now probably 15,000 or 20,000 special needs assistants, whereas there would only have been a few hundred at one point in the past. There is now a dedicated Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, with a dedicated budget for doing that. There are additional special classes and additional special schools. I really think that on any objective basis we have made a lot of progress when it comes to education and also on social welfare. As the Deputy knows, there have been increased payments and increased supports to enable people with disabilities to enter the workforce and to facilitate employers to enable them to do so. We have done work around travel passes and medical cards, reassuring people that if they take up work and they have a disability they will not lose their travel pass and will not lose their medical card.

In a lot of areas when it comes to services, there are enormous shortcomings and we all know this from our constituency practices and from the people we meet who tell us about the delays they are facing either to get an assessment of need or to get the therapies they need. A lot of that is down to the non-availability of the staff we need to do it and who have the skills to do the work that needs to be done. We have provided an extra €195 million in the budget for 2024. The roadmap to improve access to children's disability network team services was published only three weeks ago and there is a big focus on recruitment and retention of the staff we need to provide services that people with disabilities need. There is a whole new grade of assistant therapy grades being funded in 2024, which we believe will help. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, informs me that we are undertaking a review of the steps needed to allow for the optional protocol to be ratified. It remains Government policy to do that during this Government's term of office.

Those kinds of platitudes and promises are something that people have heard so many times before. These bear no resemblance to the reality. The reports about disability services in Ireland are far from the language the Taoiseach is using there. It is language like "unmet needs" and "wasted lives". The Taoiseach has said that his Government was the one to ratify it. How many years later is it and the Government still has not ratified the optional protocol aspect of it? How many years has the Government had to get to that point? In this programme for Government there was a promise to ratify it, but three years in and that has not happened. Progressing disability services is a failure. It is ruining people's lives. The worst part of it is that when a disabled person becomes an adult in Ireland that is when things actually get even worse. The Taoiseach mentioned employment rates. Ireland has the lowest employment rates for disabled people in the EU. There is no thought or consideration given to house building in relation to independent supported living and suitable housing. In the Government plans for housing there is absolutely nothing. It is all rhetoric.

We are three years into this Government. I will ask the Taoiseach the same question again. When will the Government ratify the optional protocol so people can actually exercise the rights on which the Government is spending €1.5 million on advertising?

We do not have a date for it at this stage but it remains Government policy and it remains a Government commitment to do exactly that during this term in office of this Government. The Minister is reviewing the steps needed to allow the optional protocol to be ratified. We will not wait for an optional protocol to the UN convention to be ratified to make improvements in the lives of people with disabilities.

We are doing that.

I have set out what we have done in education so far. We have come on in leaps and bounds from where we were not so long ago. I have set out the measures we have taken in social protection, including the increases people will see this week and also in December, January and throughout next year; the work we are doing to increase the number of people with disabilities in the workforce, including in the public sector, for which we have set an enhanced target; and the reforms we are trying to bring in to improve service provision in particular, which I accept is nowhere near where it needs to be. The real difficulty is not a lack of political will, funding or ambition; it is simply not being able to find the qualified, skilled staff we need to carry out the assessments and provide the therapies people with disabilities need.