Minister moves to withdraw school therapist funding from HSE over recruitment failures

Anne Rabbitte recently stormed out of a meeting with senior HSE officials after relations broke down over a lack of delivery of therapists to special schools

The Disabilities Minister is moving to withdraw funding from the HSE over a failure to recruit therapists to special schools.

Anne Rabbitte now wants to take the responsibility away from the HSE for hiring specialists to support children and instead allocate the funding and authority for this to the Department of Education.

Funding has been allocated for around 215 posts that would provide assistant speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, phycologists, and other specialists required to support pupils in schools.

Ms Rabbitte recently stormed out of a meeting with senior HSE officials after relations broke down over a lack of delivery of therapists to special schools.

While some progress has been made in hiring 14 specialists which had been promised by mid-September, officials do not believe the HSE will meet targets to have 50 therapists in school by December.

Ms Rabbitte now is looking at taking the drastic step of reallocating the funding to recruit these specialists to the National Council For Special Education and plans to discuss this with Education Minister Norma Foley.

It is expected that the issue will be raised with Tánaiste Micheál Martin at a private meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party tonight by a number of TDs.

Cork North-Central TD Padraig O'Sullivan said: "An awful lot of us at this stage would think that particularly when it comes to therapists in special schools, that those posts should be taken on the Department of Education because.

"Ultimately they are [therapists working with] students, they're in schools and should fall under the Department of Education's remit to see if they can resource those teams adequately," said Mr O'Sullivan who has been campaigning on the issue for some time.

Mr O'Sullivan plans to raise the suggestion with the Tánaiste tonight and said: "It's well documented that for whatever reason, people just don't want to work for the HSE be it the workload, the caseload that people have.

"They are obviously finding it very difficult to recruit, but there's other charity organisations that can and have found staff, have advertised successfully, and I would think that schools might be in a better situation than the actual HSE to do it."