Mr. Pat McKelvey:

I am talking about twins, triplets or even siblings who are what they call "Irish twins", two siblings who were born very close to one another and who may be in the same primary school class and transferring to secondary in the same year. The difficulty here relates to a clash between legal entitlement and common sense. Common sense would suggest that, if a twin gets a place, the other twin should also get a place because of transport issues and so on. The difficulty is that, if you treat both applications as a single unit and the applicants do not get a place, a parent can make the case that they should have been treated as a single entity and that the chances of one of the children getting in were halved because their applications were treated as a single case. If the applicants do get in, there is no difficulty for those twins but others may have a difficulty. If the twins' applications are tied together, if there are 120 places, if one twin gets in having been placed 118th and if the other twin is given the 119th place because the other twin is in, the person who finishes 121st can make the case that the second twin got a place not on the basis of a reasonable lottery but on the basis of their application having been attached to another. Legally, each individual must be treated individually. I am not a legal expert in any way but it is my understanding that the legal position is a bit like the tax treatment of couples in that each person must be treated as an individual and must, therefore, go into the lottery on their own. However, there have been several situations in my own ETB in which one twin has got in and the other has not. That is a nightmare for parents from an organisational point of view. Some twins or triplets want to be apart but it is very often the case that they want to be together. They do not grow out of that need to be together until they get close to adulthood. That needs to be looked at from a legislative perspective. It is certainly a real difficulty being experienced on the ground.