The Government has received recommendations from the Psychologists Registration Board for the regulation of the sector, the Taoiseach has told the Dáil.
Leo Varadkar said that the fact that psychologists are unregulated is a matter "of concern".
Last August, the minister for health raised the matter with the Psychologists Registration Board, he said.
He added that the board responded with recommendations "only last week", on 3 March, "and the minister and his officials are going to consider these with a view to advancing this process as soon as we can".
Minister of State at the Department of Health Anne Rabbitte said that "Minister Donnelly and Coru will be meeting in the next number of weeks to progress this matter."
She acknowledged the RTÉ Investigates programme which raised this issue.
Mr Varadkar insisted that the Government wants to regulate the sector, but noted that the process "has run into some real difficulties", including a lack of consensus following a public consultation in 2020.
He was responding to Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik who noted the findings of the RTÉ Investigates programme.
Sinn Féin's Eoin Ó Broin said that the programme "put a spotlight" on the issue and revealed "how easy it is for an unscrupulous person to take advantage" of the lack of regulation "and practice fraudulently".
The delay in regulating the sector "is putting children at risk", he said.
4,500 waiting on a needs assessment
There are more than 12,000 children waiting to see a psychologist and more than 4,500 waiting on a needs assessment, Ombudsman for Children Niall Muldoon has said.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said there is a 16-month waiting time for assessment when the legal obligation is six months.
Mr Muldoon said: "We wrote a report in the end of 2020 highlighting the fact that children's rights were being discriminated against.
"Many children were discriminated against because of that long waiting list. Since then, it's got worse, because the HSE's answer to the problem was to create a new type of assessment needs which would only last 90 minutes.
"And that was found to be against the statutory obligations by the High Court."
He said that if children do not have their needs assessed, they might fail to reach important milestones.
There is a whole range of problems within the system, he said.
Due to the long waiting list, some of the parents featured on the RTÉ Investigates programme had paid for a private diagnosis, however they were later told by the HSE that it did not recognise those assessments.
Mr Muldoon, who is also a clinical psychologist, said he met the CEO of the HSE in 2021, "looking for their plan to make this better and looking for the action timelines to go with that and asking them specifically 'what does good look like, what are you planning for?'"
He said there is a crisis in this area and a clear plan is needed.
"Because we have a crisis here and obviously you have to work on the crisis, but you also have to know what two years from now, four years from now, looks like we still haven't seen that sort of a plan."
Lack of psychologists
Mr Muldoon said that a lack of psychologists in the public system is a "big part of the problem".
"But again, we've known that for six to seven years and we needed to work on that," he said.
The ombudsman said there needs to be an increase in the number of courses available to psychologists.
"We need to fund them properly in the wider range of psychologists, kinds of psychologists, education psychologists," he said.
"What you saw yesterday was the drive of parents towards the private sector, is also working for the professionals.
"So, some of the professors [are] under so much pressure in the HSE that they sometimes will move to the private sector themselves. So, you're losing that way as well."
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Mr Muldoon criticised the HSE for not warning parents about an unqualified psychologist doing assessments and instead just rejected the reports.
"From our point of view, you've got to be aware of the impact of that. So, the child has gone through an assessment. They've had a report, the parents put all their hopes into that report allowing them to get the services, which is what it's all about.
"It's a gateway to services and when that doesn't happen then the bottom falls out of the world and the child is no further along. And this distress just grows."
Stronger regulations needed
He said if you build a system around the assessment need, you need to provide that full assessment need.
"It's about getting to the services whatever way you do it. And again, if you need to rethink assessment and need to rethink the access to services, then we need to see that plan and that action timeline," he said.
As a member of the Psychological Society of Ireland, Mr Muldoon said he is very much aware that there are plans for stronger regulations to be put in place to prevent people claiming to be a psychologist without proper qualifications.
He said: "The plan at the moment seems to be to set up individual sections of psychology to be protected.
"But what that would mean is that if you are a clinical psychologist who's struck off the register, you then call yourself a child psychologist or some other type of psychologist, and you would still be okay.
"But what we need to do is protect the title psychologist as a legal entity so that nobody can use that term without being in breach of the law. And that's how you safeguard our parents and our children."
