Children with disabilities 'being failed twice' by lack of services and system 'that doesn't recognise their needs'

The majority of those waiting to be seen by Camhs are located in Cork North and East, with 716 on the list as at the end of 2025.

Waiting lists for children with an intellectual disability to be referred to the HSE’s child mental health services almost doubled in 2025 as a lack of resources delayed the process, new figures reveal.

At the end of 2025, there were 815 children with such a disability waiting to have their case heard by the HSE, up 66% from the 491 at the end of 2024, and a massive 473% from the 142 reported 12 months before that.

The intellectual disability service within the HSE’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) is a specialist unit for children and teenagers with both an intellectual disability and potential mental health issues whose distress may not be observable in the same manner as a child without such a disability.

The Irish Examiner previously reported mental health services for children with intellectual disabilities are funded at less than half the HSE’s own requirements for a fully functioning service.

Just 10 such Camhs teams are operating nationally within the sphere, against the HSE’s service requirements, which state there should be 16 such teams in the country, and one for every 300,000 people. Those teams which do exist are operating with staffing numbers significantly below optimum levels.

The latest figures were released via parliamentary question to Social Democrats TD for Cork East Liam Quaide, a former practising psychiatrist.

They show referrals rose sharply between 2023 and 2025, from 180 to 404 each year. However, the level of referrals which were not accepted across the same time period increased at a far greater rate — 210% — as compared with those that were accepted, 36%, over the same timeframe.

In terms of waiting lists, the majority of those waiting are located in Cork North and East, with 716 on the list as at the end of 2025 — fully 88% of the country’s overall total — with 589 of those children having waited for longer than 12 weeks.

Mr Quaide said the figures show the children in question “are being failed twice — by the absence of proper services, and by a system that cannot properly even recognise their needs”.

“Camhs-ID [intellectual disability] teams are meant to support young people whose needs can be profound, whose distress may be hard to recognise, and whose families can be left carrying an unbearable burden when specialist services are not available,” he said.

The HSE’s own model of care says they need a multidisciplinary team. What these replies show instead is partial to non-existent provision, patchy recording of referrals and long waits.

He drew further attention also to the shortcomings in the data returned to his queries, with much of the requested figures marked as unavailable by the HSE due to under-resourcing or, in some cases, no intellectual disability team being in place at all.

“That is not the full picture because some of the least developed services cannot provide the data,” he said.

Areas which returned no figures include Donegal/Sligo/Leitrim, where no team or administrator is in place, and Dublin/Longford/Westmeath, which are currently not returning performance indicator statistics “due to administrative resources in the region”.

“It is recognised that there are significant shortfalls in staffing as per the model of care and that we have not reached national coverage with these specialised services,” the HSE’s assistant national director for access and integration Donan Kelly said.