Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I had the privilege on that evening last year of meeting members of Mr. Gilvarry's family too, and family is very important. Everyone lives within a family who want to see and share in his or her success, and I know that Mr. Gilvarry's family want to share in his.

My opening questions are for the NCSE. If I were to try to summarise what I have heard and read during this meeting, it is that there needs to be a presumption of access and entitlement, whereby we need to remove the idea of ableist privilege, something I keep returning to. Every experience regarding education or access needs to be seen through the lens of people with disabilities and to ensure it is proofed against their experience.

There needs to be a presumption - I liked Ms Lawless's point - that someone or several people with a disability will be on courses, not just that we have a bespoke over-by-the-side almost paternalistic provision that everybody feels good about. In fact, we need to be mainstreaming the access to everything at all times. This committee meeting has been super. It has been a great experience for me to listen and hear people explain how that ableist privilege is experienced by people in not having the reasonable accommodation built-in in advance.

We need pathways to all levels of education. I hear loud and clear the cost of living with disabilities and the fact that people have additional expense. I am appalled by Ms Newman's experience and I am grateful to her for sharing it.

Returning to the NCSE, my home constituency of Dublin South-Cental has a multitude of schools where there is no place for a child with a disability to go into and that have no special classes. Parents, even if they are trying to access the schools that have special classes, are given a list by a special educational needs organiser, SENO. They are not really supported. They are given a list and told to go off and do it themselves while they are perhaps caring for and trying to support and encourage their children into education. If their children get into education at primary level, there is no guarantee that there is a follow-on to secondary school. That has to be fought for tooth and nail by parent after parent. I was taken by Ms Kelly's point that when they have a person with an ambition for a particular thing, they are asking for concessions. The parents in groups such as Involve Autism would say that their daily life is about that arguing for concessions rather than entitlement.

I suppose I would welcome the opportunity to hear about the inadequacies of the section 37 process. Is there someone on the NCSE board with disabilities because the committee's motto, which is also that of all those who we hear, is that there should be nothing about us without us? I would be anxious to hear that. We cannot aspire to third level and post-secondary if the basics of a full schooling experience are not experienced. We have people who are looking at a primary or secondary school directly across the road from them in their home communities and yet they have to travel miles to go to a different one. I encounter the outrage of that on a daily basis. It is something I would love to see us solve.

I could be on this soapbox for a long time such is the rage that I experience from parents.