Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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It is interesting to note that the autism committee also heard this morning about mental health supports for people with autism. I note as well that the Sub-Committee on Mental Health met this morning. Balkanisation was mentioned. It is interesting that even in the Houses of the Oireachtas this morning, three different committees met to discuss more or less the same issue.

As a former primary school teacher, I share some of the frustration I have heard from members that teachers are often the last to hear and the last to be listened to, despite the fact that they spend 25 or more hours a week in the company of these children and often, apart from their parents, are the people who know these children best. Yet there does not seem to be a way to make those teaching professionals heard in respect of provision of mental health services, and that is a huge opportunity missed.

The thing that jumped out at me from the IPPN presentation was that we should have teams of education and health professionals to work with school clusters and individual schools to support children directly in the schools where they learn. To give a concrete, real-world example of that, I know of an inner-city Waterford school where there are three different CDNTs represented within that school community. One of them is based out of Dungarvan for those in Waterford west, so some of the children there are supposed to access their services in Dungarvan. That is an hour from the school each way, plus the appointment time. That is a full day for the parents. For God's sake. The school is open to this and has talked to me about it. Why on earth would we not host the services in the school building? I know that creates the issue of competency and who is in charge of that, and there is already a heavy load on school principals without having to become health professionals as well as everything else they are supposed to do, but there are opportunities there as well.

I think Mr. Crone said that schools are really good at supporting the many and that it is the few we need the specific help with. Mr. McGorman said we see the role tapered. That really is the case. We have a huge resource in respect of our teaching profession, notwithstanding that we are losing teachers and they are going abroad or moving to other areas. One of the strengths of education in Ireland, however, is that we have continued to attract really good candidates into the profession and that our education system is built on the quality of the teachers we have rather than other things. We are making progress on the pupil-teacher ratio and issues like that, but the fact that we have good-quality people in the sector is the foundation stone of our education system.

Deputy Conway-Walsh referred to career progression and allowing and enabling people to move into something like educational psychology or provision of other services. Other than that, when someone enters a teaching career, he or she will either do 40 years in the classroom or take a principalship. Many teachers I know are not interested in a principalship because those who take them stop teaching. For a walking principle, that is the end of it. The day teachers enter a principalship, they become administrators and can forget about teaching. They will occasionally get to interact with classes, but most of the time they are giving out to bold people, which is probably not why they got into teaching in the first place. We have a huge resource there and people who need other progression pathways. It seems clear as day to me that we should be pointing them in directions where they can support, interact with and teach children in a different way in our school systems.

As for educational psychologists, it would be such a huge resource, even while people are training, if they could provide, for want of a better word, that triage service of looking at people's needs and just making sense of them. Then, by the time the children are sitting in front of the educational psychologist, they are making best use of that time and not engaging in form-filling.

I do not know if anything I have said has amounted to a question in terms of punctuation marks. I do not know if I quite got to a question mark at the end of that. It was mainly observations. Perhaps the witnesses feel that some of them merit comment.