Ms Martina Mannion:

I will add to what the Minister of State said. It is a little like what Deputy O'Rourke asked about forward planning in special education. A number of years ago, the Department and the NCSE looked at all the factors that gave rise to the need for special education places in order to have a more strategic planning process. We did a thorough analysis of all the students in special schools and classes. We reviewed all the information on the primary online database, POD, and the post-primary online database, P-POD. We focused keenly on the transitions. We not only looked at the proportion of students attending special classes nationally, but we broke it down by county and school planning area for the specific purposes the Cathaoirleach is talking about. We have had 1,600 new special classes in the past four years. The Cathaoirleach will see from that information that every county got additional special classes in recent years, in primary and post-primary schools.