Mr. Andrew Geary:

I am deeply grateful for Teachta Pádraig O'Sullivan's huge assistance. It was very humbling and our family is deeply grateful for his having raised those issues for us continually in the heart of our democracy. I am very humbled by his commitment to deaf education and I thank him.

I might be corrected on this, but as far as I am aware from the Department of Education website, I believe the post has been advertised two or three times in the southern region, once in the western region and once in the eastern region. I believe one or two people have been offered the role but no one has taken up the role in the south.

I think there is a process being undergone in the west but from my anecdotal knowledge from networking with other parents, I do not believe anyone has filled the role in the east of the country. On the adequacies around the role, it can be a success. However, when you break down the amount that the person is being remunerated across the year and the number of hours an SNA is in a classroom against this new role, the person in the new role is getting paid less per hour than the old SNA role that did not work for my son. As I said, the new role has brilliant terms and conditions, raising the standard of the person who will be providing support in the classroom. The older SNA role would work for the vast majority of deaf and hard of hearing children who do not have profound hearing loss the same as Calum. Outside of the cohort of 80 or 100, this SNA role has probably worked for the vast majority. I pointed out this weakness that the remuneration does meet the terms of conditions attached to the role to the Department.

We need to set up a second interpreting school under the tutelage or stewardship of the Centre for Deaf Studies. I underwent a level 6 Irish Sign Language course in Munster Technological University, MTU, Tralee over the past few years. I do not need to do a four-year degree to become an interpreter, I believe, to go from a level 6 to a level 8. As outlined in today’s newspaper, it costs the average student attending University College Dublin, UCD, €750 in rent every month. No parent can afford to send their child to college in that environment. The excellent service being provided by the Centre for Deaf Studies is providing an average of four to six interpreters, barely covering the outgoing interpreters every year. They can come in and give their expert evidence in the future. We need to vastly improve the number of people coming out. As I said, we have a paltry number of interpreters at 80 against 500 to 800 in Finland. They have hundreds again for a similar population in Norway and Sweden. Ourpro rataratio is very poor.

As for Calum's picture in the past, he has always been a very happy child. He had a very happy time in primary school. We had some years of full access, when fully-qualified people were in the classroom. When we did not have that fully-qualified person in the classroom, that is, a person who did not have a degree in Irish Sign Language, those were difficult years for us, despite brilliant efforts by the teachers. I would never knock his teachers, who were all amazing people. Each one of them was better than the next. However, in those particular years that there was a huge amount of work on our behalf at home. My wife had to spend hundreds and thousands of hours over Calum’s life on such work. The reason he can read so well today is thanks to Helen Geary and the number of hours that she gave reading with him at home.