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Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 18 May 2017

Vol. 951 No. 2

Topical Issue Debate

Special Educational Needs Service Provision

I wish to raise the issue of what I believe is discrimination against children who started primary school in 2016 and those who will start in 2017 from consideration and allocation of resources under the new special education teaching resource model. The Minister will be aware that I raised this with the Minister in a parliamentary question on 3 May 2017 on this very topic. Parents and teachers who are concerned about the new system have told me that it is a new system of combining what was learning support, which was specific to the needs of a particular child, and high incidence special education needs. These are now being combined under this new special education resource teaching model. That might sound well and good, but my problem, and that of many parents and teachers, is the assessment upon which the information is based. The problem is going to be very serious for the first two years. The difficulty is that the Department has made allocations to schools which are fairly rigid for the next two years. It would be an extraordinarily exceptional situation for a school to be able to make a case to win an appeal to have its allocation changed under this model.

Last autumn, schools were asked to submit information and the allocation was announced on 7 March 2017. The circulars that were issued from the Department, one to the primary schools and the other to second level schools, outlining the full details of the scheme and a letter followed on how to go about an appeal.

The issue I am highlighting is that children who started in 2016 did not have any medical or professional assessment at that point, so their needs could not have been taken into consideration when these matters were being considered last winter and before the allocation was announced in March this year. They had not yet found their way into the system, they were brand new in their new schools in junior infants. That is a very bad situation but we will also find that children with specific problems starting next September who have not had a previous diagnosis will find there is no extra allocation in their schools.

What confounded me about the Minister's reply to the parliamentary question is that when I highlighted those two specific issues, the Minister said, "The new allocations to schools will include provision to support all pupils in the schools, including where a child receives a diagnosis after the allocation is received by a school, or where there are newly enrolling pupils to the school." He is saying that the allocation will include those whose information was not there, because they did not have a diagnosis.

The Minister went on to say, "For students who start school from September 2017, with a specific diagnosis, either in junior infants or transferring from another school, the resources they need will already be in the school under the new model." The Minister is telling me, the parents and the teachers that he is psychic - that was the school's response to me. The Minister had made an allocation based on the information he had last year and in his written reply he said that if children starting in 2017 have a specific diagnosis, the resources will already be there based on the previous allocation which he had issued. The Minister is saying he knew those children were going to present. He did not know they were going to present, he could not have known they were going to present. Reading that, the school principal said that the only way the Minister could know that is if he thinks he is psychic. I want the Minister to be flexible with the appeals system. That is it in a nutshell. There is no other route for parents to get this matter administered. I do not want a rigid appeals system, I want flexibility.

This is a new scheme and I understand people wanting to tease out what it means. First, I want to make it clear that it has been recommended by the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, which is an independent body, it had been conducted with a pilot of 47 schools where it had a very positive reception. It involves an increase in the number of teachers provided by 900, so at least 1,200 schools will get additional resources. It will mean that if one has a child with special educational needs, one no longer needs a diagnostic test to establish support for the child. Instead of enrolling, waiting for a diagnostic test and then eventually getting an allocation later on, the school is pre-equipped with the resource to meet the needs of the children with complex needs.

The Deputy asks how we know the level of enrolment of children with complex needs. What has been done is that a profile of the whole school has been taken, so that if X% is children with complex needs, they are provided for, even though those children have not yet presented. In other words, a profile of the school and the expected level of children who will arrive with complex needs based on the existing profile of the school is used to predict how many children will turn up with special educational needs. That is a clear and known input.

The Department has also made provision for an appeal so that if, for example, the norm was three children with very complex needs per cohort of the school and for some reason a family moved into the area and that three increased to seven then, under the appeals mechanism, the Department would clearly take that into account. Similarly if the school is very rapidly growing and a developmental school under the developmental status, that would be a criterion for the school to get additional help.

We are providing more resources in this sphere, we are guaranteeing that no school loses out so that every school will have additional existing provision. We are making sure that the school is geared up with that extra resource from day 1 and we are also promoting a much more inclusive approach to the way in which children with special education needs are integrated into the school. That has been a feature which has been particularly successful in the pilots. Instead of children being withdrawn for their special support, as had been the case, this is a much more integrated approach with group, individual, and classroom support. I was told by those who had been through the pilot that it had been a boost, not only for the children with special needs but all the children in the school, and that all the teaching staff saw that the integration and successful learning outcomes for those children with special needs became a whole school project.

We will provide support to the school in terms of capacity building. There will be an integrated support service in the NCSE. We are doing everything possible to make sure this will achieve the benefits that were clearly delivered in the pilot.

I can understand the concerns because this is a different method. Its avoids the €1,000 expense of diagnostic tests. The Deputy knows that schools in disadvantaged areas could not afford that. Principals were playing God in trying to decide which of a number of children they would send for diagnostic tests. That has all been thrown away and we have a much fairer basis for allocating the available resource.

I understand why the Minister made the decision. As he said, it was partly due to financial and administrative reasons and the time taken for diagnostic tests. He referred to socio-economic criteria for schools. The profile involves an averaging system, but children are not average. Every child is different. That is the essential point that is being lost in the system. It is administratively convenient.

I am speaking on behalf of the parents and schools who have come to me about this issue. The Minister has said there is no need for diagnostic tests. Without such tests, sometimes particular conditions or children's special requirements will not be made available to a school principal, who cannot be an expert. Medical and professional diagnostic tests were necessary to identify specific requirements for children until now. The Minister decided that costs money and instead proposed to save some time, scrap the system and allow principals to muddle away as best they can. That is not really good enough because principals are not experts and do not have the required diagnostic skills that professionals have.

We are shoving the old system to one side. The Minister is giving more flexibility to principals who now have to play God a little bit more because they are not receiving specific reports on specific children.

I am also concerned about the paragraph in the circular which states that some schools may now choose to enrol children that they know have special needs in these areas because it will eat into the allocation they already have. Essentially, the Department said the Minister reserves the right to review the allocation. In other words, the Minister is threatening to punish the other children in a school by reviewing its allocation if it does not enrol children who would otherwise have enrolled in the school and may have received an extra allocation.

The appeals process was very short. The process began in early March and appeals had to be in by the end of March after the earlier announcement. How many appeals has the Minister received? That information would be a good indication as to whether the problem is significant or manageable. I ask the Minister to be flexible with appeals, given that this is a new system.

I hope I did not mislead the Deputy when I said there is no need for a diagnostic test for a child to get support. I am not saying that diagnostic tests are no longer relevant or valuable. A diagnostic test can be valuable in the hands of a teacher in order to give an indication of what is needed.

In many cases, the special learning needs of a child will be quite obvious to a teacher. Under this model, teachers will not have to wait for a diagnostic test to be done before they can provide teaching support to a child. Where a diagnostic test is of value in setting out an educational programme for a child, that will be used and will be a valuable input for a teacher.

I reiterate that we are putting 900 extra teachers and €54 million of resources in place in order to support the improved model. It is not a question of short-changing people who will be enrolling in September this year compared to those who enrolled last September. There will be more resources available to meet the needs of children this September than there were last year.

I will get the Deputy the details of the number of people involved in the verification process. At this stage, schools are mainly asking how their calculation was done. I do not think a school has said a profile said it would have three children with complex needs but it has much more than that. That sort of appeal has not reached us yet. I will try to get the Deputy some information on the state of play of the verification process.

Agriculture Scheme Payments

Over the past number of weeks all of us have been lobbied by farming organisations and individual farmers regarding outstanding payments in respect of GLAS, the AEOS, organic farming schemes, the knowledge transfer programme and TAMS. The figures in the Irish Farmers' Journal this week show that 2,729 farmers are owed approximately €3,500 in GLAS payments on average. In the AEOS schemes, 1,166 farmers are owed approximately €3,141 on average. In the organic farming scheme, 326 farmers are owed between €6,000 and €8,000 on average.

I understand 4,222 farmers are now waiting for payments under those three schemes. Many have spent thousands of euro to meet the requirements of the schemes. They have planted hedges and sowed crops to achieve environmental targets set down and to adhere to various scheme rules. The situation is causing serious cashflow difficulties to the farmers concerned.

The Minister of State has to accept that those in receipt of GLAS, AEOS and organic farm payments are at the low end of the income scale of farming in general. The payments are paramount for their survival.

On top of that, many farmers borrowed heavily on the understanding that they had been approved for TAMS. In some case they have borrowed €30,000, €40,000, €50,000 or €60,000. They are awaiting payments. Reasons as to why payments have not been forthcoming have been put down to computer chaos and IT worries within the Department. This is unacceptable. As I said, farmers who have invested in schemes , including TAMS, have done so in good faith. They have lived up to their responsibilities within the various schemes. Their survival depends on their being paid speedily.

I do not think any other sector, such as teachers, gardaí or those in the trade union movement, would accept being treated like that. The excuse the Department is hiding behind, that is, IT or computer chaos, is not acceptable. Investment in the IT sector has changed the focus of the basic payment scheme and has been a fantastic success.

When will farmers be paid? Will the 4,222 affected by the three schemes I mentioned be paid? I do not have figures for TAMS, but I understand a substantial number of people have payments outstanding. When will they get their payments?

I am quite sure that backbenchers will insist that these payments are long overdue. People who borrowed money in order to live up to their requirements find themselves paying interest of perhaps 9% for personal loans for a considerable number of months with no certainty regarding their payments. Can the Minister of State enlighten us in that regard? I ask him to give solace to people who are waiting for payments.

I thank Deputy Ferris for raising this issue. I understood he wanted to discuss TAMS, but I will try to cover other matters as best I can. I will set out the current position regarding the targeted agricultural modernisation scheme, TAMS II. During 2015, a suite of six measures were announced under TAMS II. These measures were launched under the new rural development programme 2014-20 and are co-funded under the European agricultural fund for rural development.

The measures provide grants for capital investment in physical assets and there are six headings, which the Deputy will know. Among the objectives of the scheme are to enable growth in competitiveness in the sector, address environmental and climate change issues, support increased efficiency in holdings and improve animal health and welfare. In addition to these objectives, the young farmers capital investment scheme aims to address one of the key structural issues in the sector by specifically targeting support at young trained farmers by offering them a greater rate of aid intensity, that is, 60% of grant aid compared to a standard rate of 40%.

In March this year, an additional measure, the tillage capital investment scheme, was launched. One of the objectives of this scheme was to facilitate the tillage sector to develop a targeted and precise approach, focusing on environmental dividends, efficiency and growth.

Specific areas of investment under the tillage measure include minimum disturbance tillage equipment, sprayers, rainwater harvesting, grain storage and grain dryers. As with all measures, applications must be made online, either by the farmer or an adviser authorised to act on his or her behalf. TAMS II is opened in rolling three month tranches. The next closing date for applications under the first tranche of the tillage measure and the seventh tranche of the other measures is 30 June 2017. The financial allocation for TAMS II for the full rural development plan period is €395 million. To facilitate the drawdown of EU funding, we have provided increased budget certainty to ensure that all farmers can avail of funding over the entire period of the scheme.

This scheme has proved popular with Irish farmers and over 11,700 applications have been submitted to date. Of these, 8,350, or more than 70%, have been approved. Approvals are issuing on an ongoing basis with approvals under the most recent tranche due to commence shortly. The figures are much lower when it comes to payment claims. It is open to approved applicants to submit an online payment claim as soon as they are in a position to do so. The timing of the submission of a payment claim before the approved deadline is entirely a matter for the individual farmer. To date, only 1,368 payment claims have been submitted. The Department has actively encouraged approved applicants to submit payment claims including by contacting approved applicants individually by text message. A small number of claims have not yet been paid as the IT functionality to reduce over-claims is currently being developed. To date, payments amounting to over €10 million have issued in 847 cases. All payment claims submitted are being examined on an ongoing basis. Where an issue arises with a payment claim, the applicant concerned is contacted directly by the Department to resolve it.

In relation to GLAS, the 2016 payments represented the first full-year payments under the scheme. To be very clear, only GLAS tranche 1 and tranche 2 participants are eligible for a payment in respect of 2016. At the end of December 2016, there were approximately 37,500 active tranche 1 and 2 participants in GLAS, of whom 27,400, or over 70%, received 85% of the 2016 payment in December. These payments were valued at over €97 million. GLAS has a range of over 30 actions available for selection by applicants under the different regulations. Given their complexity, many issues require review on a case-by-case basis. This work is ongoing in the remaining 2,700 cases. Where issues remain, my Department, or rather the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine - I would not like to assume I am getting a different job - has been in direct contact with participants or their advisers and is making every effort to resolve outstanding issues on a case-by-case basis. Additional information or outstanding documentation has been requested and is awaited in over 1,000 of these cases. In this regard, I urge participating farmers to return outstanding documentation, such as an interim commonage management plan or annual low-emissions slurry spreading declaration, so that the Department can moves things on.

The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Michael Creed, wants these issues dealt with as do his officials. They will do all in their power to get people their payments as quickly as possible.

I find it difficult to understand how this has arisen when there was a huge number of claims at the start which the computers and officials were able to process. There are now roughly 4,222 claims across the knowledge transfer, organic farmer, AEOS and GLAS schemes, which seems a very small number. If it is possible to process tens of thousands of claims in a period and only 4,000 or so are left, I cannot understand how things are now so slow and the Department is not able to deal with them. In my county alone, approximately 150 GLAS payments remain outstanding. It was 189 two weeks ago. As such, 39 payments have been made in two weeks.

A person I am currently dealing with regarding TAMS II was given the go-ahead in early August 2016 over the phone on the back of which he borrowed money from the bank to buy equipment. Now, he will not be paid because the Department says he made those payments prior to getting written approval. It is not acceptable that somebody who has borrowed a great deal of money finds himself in a situation where he will have to appeal to get this sorted out.

It may be stretching things a bit, but I want to raise the issue of grain farmers and the result of a Private Members' motion here. Their losses last year would have been sorted out with €4 million. I ask the Minister of State, Deputy English, to use his influence with the Minister, or to act if he is the new Minister, to ensure that the grain farmers who were decimated last year get some support. It is a very small amount of money. The Minister has made a commitment to increase the ANC payments by €25 million in the 2018 budget. I hope Deputy English will be the Minister. I see him nodding his head as if he is going to meet all those commitments. I hope he will live up to all that when he becomes the Minister, if he does.

I am sure Deputy Creed expects to be Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine for a very long time and my understanding from farmers is that they want to keep him as Minister for a long time. While there might be a new Taoiseach, I am sure Deputy Creed will still be there and taking questions here. Again, I expressed his apologies at the outset that he could not take the debate here himself.

The online payment claims system has been open since July 2016 but to date a low number of payment claims have been submitted as compared with the number of approvals requested. Of the 1,368 payment claims submitted to date, 847 have been paid. Payments are issuing on an ongoing basis. Payments in the amount of more than €10 million have been made. The current outstanding payment claims, of which there are 521, generally fall into the following four categories, with the estimates percentages as well. Some 75% of claims are clean cases. These are cases where the claims application is fully in order and being worked on and should issue soon. Claims where there is an obvious error on the application form which the regional inspector is examining on an ongoing basis with payments then issuing represent 10% of cases. A further 10% of cases involve an issue with the claim which will lead to a reduction in payment but no incurred penalty. The IT functionality to process these claims is expected to be operational in early June. Approximately 5% of cases are those where there was an issue with the claim which will lead to both a penalty and a reduced payment. The IT functionality to process these claims is expected to be operational in July.

Delivery of the full IT functionality to allow for the processing of payment claims where a penalty is to be applied is being developed. Issues with individual payment claims are being resolved on an individual basis through direct contact by the Department with the farmer concerned or his or her adviser. I do not have the county-by-county breakdown but I trust the figures Deputy Ferris has for Kerry are correct. I cannot confirm them. The Minister is determined that this issue will be resolved where the cases are straightforward. In this case, 75% of claims are clean and straightforward and he hopes to progress them as quickly as he possibly can. The Department will work hard to make that happen.

Homeless Persons Supports

Tomorrow, it will be 11 months to the day since the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, Deputy Simon Coveney, launched the Rebuilding Ireland strategy in an attempt to address the spiralling housing and homelessness crisis. While it set out some ambitious goals, it highlighted again the Government's total ideological reliance on the private rented sector as a provider of housing. One of the Minister's many promises, which has been reiterated consistently over the year, was that by mid-2017 emergency hotel and bed and breakfast type accommodation for families would only be used in limited circumstances and would have largely been replaced by suitable permanent family accommodation through the delivery of additional housing solutions. Part 34 of Rebuilding Ireland includes a whole section on moving families out of hotels and recognises that accommodating family units in hotel arrangements is inappropriate for anything other than a short period of time. The document states an intention to move the existing group of families out of hotel arrangements as quickly as possible and to limit the extent to which such accommodation has to be used for new presentations. Deputy Coveney has continued to repeat that message over the past ten months, as has the Minister of State, Deputy English, setting 1 July as the target.

Over recent months in particular, I have received, like other Deputies, increasing numbers of calls from very stressed and distressed parents wondering what will happen to their families in the next six weeks. These are families who have been living in cramped hotel rooms for six, 15, 18, and 24 months and who are desperately hoping to be permanently rehoused. They are now waiting for a call to tell them whether they will be moved to the next temporary accommodation. They are hoping their children's school and support needs will be taken into consideration. The figures for April are late. The most up-to-date figures available are from the week of 20 March when 1,069 families, including 2,134 children, were homeless in Dublin. Of these, 712 were single-parent families. Another 187 families, including 429 children, were spread across the country with 118 of them headed by single parents. A large proportion of the Dublin families are from the constituency which I am very proud to represent, Dublin Bay North. Families have rightly pointed out that if they were in the private rented sector, they would be given notice of a moving date. With just six weeks to the Department's deadline, when will these families be told what their future accommodation will be?

At a briefing organised by my colleague, Deputy Boyd Barrett, earlier this week, my parliamentary assistant asked Mr. Mike Allen of Focus Ireland whether his organisation has any indication of what is happening, given that Focus Ireland is providing support to homeless families. It seems communication on the matter has been dire and Focus Ireland's understanding now is that only new families entering homelessness will be diverted into the so-called hubs and those in hotel accommodation will remain there until housed. Is this true? Will the Minister of State confirm this evening that only families who become homeless after 1 July will be diverted from hotel and guesthouse accommodation? What will happen to the thousands of children and adults now living in that accommodation?

When we first heard about the hubs idea, which are basically homeless hostels for families, I asked the Minister, Deputy Coveney, a number of parliamentary questions to try to ascertain the type of accommodation these hubs might be. Unfortunately the Minister evaded answering the question. He said the answer to the family homeless crisis will be increases in rent supplement and housing assistance payment levels. As the Minister of State knows, HAP is largely unavailable, in my experience, to families in homeless accommodation or coming out of homelessness. When will the Minister of State stop allowing landlords and developers to hold our country to ransom? Family homelessness has been a multi-million euro business for hotels, with €40 million paid in 2016 alone. How many houses would we have built for this? This is why I will support the motion later this evening on a FEMPI-type programme to end family homelessness.

It is utterly disgraceful that families in hotels and guesthouses have been put under grave additional uncertainty in recent months and up to the end of June. They have already endured incredible disruption and damage to their children's lives due to the closing down of social housing by the current and previous two austerity Governments.

I thank the Deputy for raising the issue. It is not an ideological issue that we are relying on the private sector. We recognise we cannot provide overnight enough social housing to be able to deal with the situation.

The Minister of State could start a housing programme.

We have a housing programme that has started, and Deputy Broughan is well aware of it. We have secured the largest investment ever in the State, secured by the Minister, Deputy Coveney, to invest in this area. The Deputy referred to the previous two Governments. If he checks the records he will see the provision of social housing was wound down before Fine Gael came into government and before the Deputy's former party, the Labour Party, came into government.

I am blaming the two previous Governments.

We did not do it. We have done our best to ramp it back up again. Just to be clear on the record, it was not a Fine Gael decision to stop-----

I was told at the time there were 25,000-----

The Deputy will have another opportunity.

I just want to be clear, and I want to put this on the record because I am sick and tired of being told it is my party which stopped social housing. We did not. We are the ones who are putting social housing front and centre in what the Government and local government is doing. I have been around the country with local authorities telling them that we expect, and we want to continue with this, them to be the lead agencies for social housing. This was stopped by other parties in government but it was certainly not Fine Gael. Deputy Broughan knows that and I ask him to please stop saying it as if it were true that it was us because it was not us. We are doing our best to put it back as quickly as we possibly can.

Having said that, I still thank the Deputy for raising the issue and providing the opportunity to update the House on actions being taken to address homelessness, in particular family homelessness, including our goal to ensure that hotels are only used to accommodate families on an emergency basis and in very limited and exceptional circumstances from the end of June.

The Government is fully committed to addressing the issue of homelessness. Under this Government there has been a focused and co-ordinated approach to tackling homelessness across Departments and agencies. As we know, Rebuilding Ireland was launched in July 2016, more than nine months ago, as the Deputy said. It is a whole-of-government plan developed in close co-operation with other key Departments and agencies, under the oversight of a dedicated Cabinet committee chaired by An Taoiseach. The committee meets every month to discuss all of the issues and I attended the meeting on Monday. The plan sets out the path to achieving the critical national ambition of ensuring that all our people have access to quality and affordable housing and to ramp up what local authorities are able to deliver through new builds, voids and purpose built social housing.

The long-term solution to the current homeless issue is to increase the supply of homes. Accordingly, Rebuilding Ireland is designed to accelerate all types of housing supply, including social, private and rental. During the lifetime of the plan, some 47,000 new social houses will be provided, supported by Exchequer investment of more than €5 billion, and housing output generally will be progressively increased towards the target of producing 25,000 houses per year through all channels. We hope to hit this target ahead of our five-year plan.

It is intended that the long-term housing needs of those currently homeless, including those families currently accommodated in hotels, will be met through housing supports such as the enhanced housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme, and general social housing allocations. Significant outputs are being achieved in this regard. Housing authorities achieved more than 3,000 sustainable exits from homeless accommodation into independent tenancies during 2016, a record level of exits in a calendar year. It is untrue to say HAP does not provide a useful solution to help some of those families who are homeless-----

Not in our area. It is fantasy.

That is not what the Deputy said. He did not say in his area, he said it is not working and he is wrong in that.

It is not working for a lot of the country.

The Deputy is wrong as 3,000 left last year. Accommodating family units in hotel arrangements is inappropriate for anything other than a short period of time, and I totally and utterly agree with the Deputy on that. Accordingly, Rebuilding Ireland makes explicit the commitment to ensure that by mid-2017 hotels will only be used as emergency accommodation in limited circumstances.

The need to limit the use of commercial hotels as emergency accommodation is particularly relevant in the Dublin region, given that approximately 85% of all homeless families are in the Dublin region. It is the Minister's intention and my intention that families be transitioned from hotel arrangements as quickly as possible, and to limit the extent to which such accommodation has to be used for new presentations. The mid-2017 target is a necessarily ambitious one, and one to which the Government remains fully committed. We must be ambitious in addressing this social issue, and while we acknowledge it is a challenging objective, given the continuing numbers of those presenting as homeless, I am pleased to see progress being made in this regard.

I am confident the April homelessness figures, once finalised, will show a significant reduction in the reliance on hotel accommodation for homeless families, which is the key.

The Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach are leaving jobs today. The reality is Fine Gael was involved in the complete cessation of any kind of a reasonable social housing programme. We can go back to one of the Minister of State's predecessors, Mr. Jimmy Tully, who ensured during a very poor time that 25,000 or 30,000 houses were built in this country in the early 1970s. The Minister of State has not answered the question. What is the future for these families? Will it be, as Focus Ireland understands, that only families newly becoming homeless are those who will not be sent to hotel accommodation? The Minister of State is not ending the uncertainty and the disruption for the families here this evening, unfortunately. He is not addressing the key point.

The Minister of State spoke about HAP and certainly the experience in Dublin Bay North, and I believe in all of the other high rent areas of the country, is that HAP is not working, particularly for people facing homelessness and people trying to come out of homeless accommodation. Every letter I get from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive states citizens and their families are eligible for HAP-type accommodation, but these same people have sent out dozens of emails and attended dozens of viewings of apartments and houses and when people find out they are coming out of homeless accommodation there is no tenancy available. That is the reality. The HAP system is just not working for the people I represent. One suggestion is the Minister of State might ask why Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council are not directly responsible for organising to provide HAP accommodation rather than asking hapless and very vulnerable homeless families to do it for themselves.

I notice the modular housing, which has been referred to a lot by the Minister, Deputy Coveney, is now scheduled to become permanent accommodation, despite the problems we had in this city back in the 1970s and 1980s with modular-type quick build housing. I welcome the small suite of measures in Rebuilding Ireland, but it is far too little and too late for the thousands of adults and children I represent and other Deputies represent. Quite clearly, we need a much more drastic solution. Unfortunately, the Government will not give it to us.

The Deputy raised several issues. Some rapid build construction houses are being sold privately for more than €500,000.

They are not modular homes. They are proper houses that will last 60, 70, 80 or 100 years. Do not try to give the impression they are not that.

Did the Minister of State ever work on site?

I did actually, probably more so than most people here.

I know what I am talking about. I have seen rapid build and every type of build. The Deputy can trust me I have watched rapid build houses being built and sold for more than €500,000. Do not try to give the impression they are some sort of a pretend house, and not a real house or a permanent house, because that is not what they are. They are a genuinely good house.

We had problems before.

There are many different types of rapid build construction. The Deputy said HAP is not working. It is only one of the solutions, and family hubs and purchasing houses through the Housing Agency and using houses through the sale and lease back scheme, are all options that bring in more houses, but the Deputy keeps insisting that HAP is not working. To me, HAP is a better scheme than the previous rental systems.

It is not working for homeless people.

Can I finish please?

If the Deputies want a bilateral they can have it outside.

I would love it. That would be great. I will provide some figures for last year from the housing authority.

It is worth noting that nationally in 2016, over 1,200 new social housing tenancies were awarded to homeless households. Furthermore, we expect that those families currently accommodated in hotels will primarily have their housing needs met through the housing assistance payment, HAP. The Deputy said that no homeless person is getting the HAP. I am pleased to say that last year, more than 800 HAP tenancies were created for homeless households in a pilot in the Dublin region, so factually, the Deputy is not right. He might be aware of some cases where there are difficulties. I am not saying the HAP works for everybody; I am saying that the facts speak for themselves.

It does not work for many of my constituents.

More than 500 tenancies have been achieved to date in 2017. They are people presented new to being homeless and were found accommodation through the HAP scheme and other schemes.

With regard to the family hubs, I have been in them and I ask the Deputy to go and have a look at some of them. I visited the Respond! hub and the Mater Dei facility, which will be ready in June. They are very good facilities for families. If a new family presents as being homeless and if we cannot get them a house through all the various schemes and through the HAP, the family hubs will be used for them as well.

The Minister's time has expired.

In some cases, people who are in hotels might first transition to a family hub-----

Thank you. We will move on.

-----but the intention still stands that by the end of June this year-----

Minister, we are moving on.

-----those people in hotels will be out of hotels.

Hospital Consultant Recruitment

We have a number of Ministers in the Department of Health. Is the Minister of State taking the question?

It is unfortunate that he has been delegated that duty when there are a number of Ministers of State, as well as the Minister for Health, who could respond on an important matter that has been brought to the attention of the public this week, namely, that non-specialist doctors are being appointed as consultants.

In recent years we have seen a massive recruitment crisis in health care, primarily due to the failure by the current and previous Government to keep our graduates in the country and in training schemes. However, it appears that the solution from the Health Service Executive, HSE, and the Department of Health was to appoint people as consultants when they were not part of specialist training schemes. That has considerable consequences for patient safety and patient care. To be clear, the HSE's own definition of a consultant is defined as a registered medical or dental practitioner who, by reason of his or her training, skill and expertise, is in a designated specialty, is consulted by other registered medical practitioners and has a continuing clinical and professional responsibility to the patients under his or her care.

We know that under the Medical Practitioners Act 2007, consultants must be part of specialist training schemes to be the very definition of a consultant. However, we know, from good authority from people on the ground, that the Government and the HSE have appointed people to positions for which they are not actually qualified and where they are not in the specialised training schemes. That has massive consequences for patient safety.

Were the Minister of State running the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and had he responsibility for airlines and pilots, would he be happy to have a captain flying a plane who did not have a licence for that position? As I think his answer would be "No", why is it good enough for the Government and the HSE to allow people to be appointed to consultant positions when they are not on specialist training schemes and do not meet the definition the State has upheld? It has considerable consequences for patient safety for those with complex medical conditions. They have presented with an enormous problem in their lives and are told the consultant in whatever hospital is addressing that matter but under the definition of the State, that consultant is not a consultant because he or she is not part of specialist training schemes. It is a form of deception. It is misleading patients but is also undermining the training of other junior doctors within our hospital system because if the lead clinician or consultant is not actually a consultant and is not part of a specialist training scheme leading a particular clinical team, that undermines the training and recruitment process for the other junior doctors who may be part of specialist training schemes.

The fact that the Government has employed people permanently when they are not consultants as defined by the HSE is a massive issue of ethics. It breaches the Medical Practitioners Act 2007 and it breaches the consultant contract. It is fundamental, therefore, that the Minister of State gives an explanation, even though it is not his line Department, as to how this has occurred. Is he happy that clinical safety will be upheld and can he provide certainty to the House that this practice is not systemic because we have it on good authority that this is the case?

Were the Minister of State heading up the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, he would not be happy for pilots to fly planes when they are not licensed to do so. That is what is happening at present in the health service, and it is very unfortunate that neither the Minister for Health nor any Minister of State in that Department is present because this is a massive issue of clinical safety. Clearly, it is not important enough for them to show up and I am disappointed by that.

I am here to answer the question raised by Deputy Jack Chambers. The Minister, Deputy Harris, had hoped to be present but as the Deputy is aware, the timing of this moved quite a bit today. It is normal practice for the Minister or one of his Ministers of State to cover these issues, and the Deputy knows that. To be fair, there is no point in him trying to go down that road because it is not believable.

One of them should be here.

Generally, they are here as often as possible.

I am taking the matter on behalf of the Minister, Deputy Harris. I want to thank the Deputy for raising it and giving me the opportunity to provide clarification.

I want to be clear, on behalf of the Minister for Health, that he expects the HSE to comply with statutory and policy requirements when filling consultant posts. He also recognises that the HSE has done an amount of work in the past year to ensure that is the case. However, it is recognised that there are limited circumstances where an experienced doctor, usually a senior registrar who would not be on the specialist register, may cover for an absent consultant. That is to ensure senior medical coverage and the provision of safe, quality care. The HSE has stated that this only occurs as a final option in emergency circumstances.

I wish to emphasise that any doctor who occupies a consultant post, even if he or she is not on the specialist register, would still hold a medical licence. It is similar to what the Deputy said about the pilot licence. They still hold a medical licence, and the Deputy should not try to give the impression that they do not-----

They do not hold a licence for the specialist training regime.

-----and would be on a division of the Medical Council register. They are also fully qualified to practise medicine.

At a national level, health policy remains the development of a consultant provided service as per the report of the national task force on medical staffing, the Hanly report, and the reports of the strategic review of medical training and career structures, that is, the MacCraith reports of 2013 and 2014. The HSE has also been focused on improving the recruitment and appointment process for consultant posts. A high-level committee, appointed by the director general of the HSE, was tasked with analysing the current operational and administrative barriers to the efficient creation, approval of and recruitment to consultant posts in 2016. Having reviewed processes around successful consultant recruitment, 33 findings were identified and related actions for implementation developed. These are set out in a HSE document entitled Towards Successful Consultant Recruitment, Appointment and Retention, which was published in February 2017.

One of the findings of the committee specifically relates to this issue of providing services by those who are appropriately qualified. The finding stated that the HSE should ensure that "measures are adopted to cease the poor employment practice which gives rise to contracts of indefinite duration and risk to the public arising from provision of services by persons who are not appropriately qualified". It also set out a series of actions the HSE should take to address this issue. These require the HSE to review the extent to which permanent posts have been created or filled in breach of appropriate sanction; to act as a matter of urgency to enforce existing regulatory requirements; and that sanctions are implemented for non-compliance with qualifications. The executive should also clarify the scope of practice of the individuals referenced above and related designation as "consultants". It should also work with the Department of Health, the Medical Council and representative bodies to examine the use of the term "consultant" in regard to the specialist division. The timeline given for carrying out these actions is by the end of June 2017. The Minister, Deputy Harris, is confident that once these actions are implemented, they will help to address the issues raised by the Deputy.

I will conclude by noting that the number of consultants employed by the HSE at the end of March 2017 now stands at 2,881. That is an increase of an additional 122 whole-time equivalent posts since March 2016. It is also an increase of almost 700 in the past decade. I can assure the Deputy that the Government remains committed to continuing to increase the number of consultants and to the delivery of a consultant-led service.

With due respect, the Minister of State did not answer the question. In terms of a statutory framework, he said that all clinicians have a licence to practise. They do, but if the Minister reads the Medical Practitioners Act, he will see that it splits medical practitioners into two fields. There is the general licensing but then there is the specialist training licence regime. The Government has appointed consultants, pretending they are specialist registered consultants who have gone through that scheme, when they have not. That is what has happened here.

We know it is not in limited or emergency circumstances. We know it has happened on a systemic basis as a permanent solution to the recruitment crisis. Therefore, the analogy of the pilot who does not have a licence on the plane is very accurate because consultants whom the Government has appointed are practising as specialist, trained consultants when they are not such consultants. That is a fundamental breach of trust, ethics and the core principles of clinical practice. It raises serious issues concerning patient safety and care.

When patients believe consultants are properly trained and qualified to do the job when in fact they have not gone through the full specialist training scheme, it is a massive issue of trust, care and clinical outcomes. When the consultants have not the experience and have not gone through the specialist scheme, it has an impact on clinical safety. That is why we have rigorous, proper schemes through the various clinical faculties across medicine.

The Minister of State needs to explain this and also address it. It is important not to quote gross numbers about consultants. This is about the people who have been appointed who are not on specialist training schemes. That the Minister of State has not addressed my specific question shows this has happened. It is important that it be addressed.

I will be as brief as I possibly can. I did answer the question in detail and I explained to the Deputy all that has been done. The high level working groups have tried to address this and any concerns the Deputy has and deal with the process.

We recognise that there are approximately 300 consultant posts that are difficult to fill due to geographical location or the nature of the speciality. Many consultants trained in Ireland are much sought after in other English-speaking countries. Some of the posts are filled on a locum or temporary contract basis. In a small number of cases, some people filling the posts are entitled to contracts of indefinite duration. As I said, that can be an issue. Where a highly specialised skill is required, a person who is not capable of doing the job would not be offered the consultant post. I want to be clear about that. The Deputy is asking me whether what he describes is common practice. All I can say to him is that in order to ensure senior medical coverage and the provision of safe, quality care, the HSE has stated that what was described occurs only as a final option in emergency circumstances. That is what we are trying to achieve. When I quoted figures on consultants it was just to remind the Deputy that in times of plenty there were 800 fewer consultants.

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