Autism centre lying idle five years due to ‘red tape’

FIVE years after it was built, a €1.3million residential centre for adults with autism remains shut because of red tape and lack of funding.

The purpose-built single home for eight people at Dromavalla, Ballyseedy, outside Tralee, Co. Kerry, is modelled on a facility in Co. Meath and was built by the Irish Society for Autism.

Local charities and Kerry County Council contributed hundreds of thousands of euro to the project.

Some €200,000 was raised on the Ring of Kerry annual charity cycle alone.

The HSE in Cork and Kerry said it is not responsible for funding it and has no money in its 2019 budget to do so.

The state-of-the-art centre is attached to a small farm to provide activity as well as food for its residents. An open day was held in April 2014 when the project was completed.

However, despite its completion, the centre has never opened.

The arrangement between the ISA/HSE and a service provider appointed by the HSE to register the facility with Health Information and Quality Authority has broken down.

The ISA is now calling on the HSE ‘to secure a replacement service provider for an autism-specific service in Kerry’.

But the HSE is adamant the centre ‘is not a HSE or Cork Kerry Community Healthcare project and that funding has never been committed to the project’.

‘We have not committed any funding to this project, and we have no funding available in 2019 for this project or similar projects. However, we would be happy with any suitable service provider in making the case to government for funding for services to meet the critical, unmet need in the area, which we are very aware of,’ according to a statement from the HSE.

The ISA said it was disappointed to learn that the HSE and the service provider approved by Hiqa ‘experienced difficulties’. ‘[We are] urging the HSE to secure an alternative service provider as soon as possible,’ the ISA said.

Supports for adults with autism are difficult to find in rural Ireland, ISA deputy executive director Tara Matthews added: ‘Autism-specific supports can be sparse, particularly in rural Ireland.

‘This purpose-built home can offer muchneeded support to those living with autism and their families.’

Jimmy Adams and his wife Patricia, whose 28-year-old son James has autism, have been fundraising and campaigning for the centre for two decades. They believe the HSE should intervene. Meetings between the ISA and the HSE Cork Kerry Community Health Services are to take place to appoint another service provider but this could take months, Mr Adams thinks. ‘It’s all games. We are like pawns in the middle of all of this,’ Mr Adams told Radio Kerry.

Comment – Page 12

‘We are like pawns in the middle of all of this’