Ms Eleanor McSherry:

If there were three things, the first I would mention is that there should be no waiting lists. When you get your diagnosis you have to wait a massive amount of time and that has never changed. I also mention proper resourcing, training across the board and a multidisciplinary solution for a multidisciplinary problem. It is not just the HSE, but also the training.

We should remember that at the end of the day, in order to make change we need to have everyone buying into it. As I said, I trained teachers and so has Dr. Crawford and I also come from a medical family. There can be an issue every time a change is brought in, like when we found out this week that all of a sudden principals will be doing assessments of need. I have seen that in the Twitter sphere, which has gone crazy with the news. We cannot have this swipe-of-a-pen attitude. The catalogue of disasters we have involves reactiveness like that. We need to be able to look at a multidisciplinary solution that has buy-in. We must have all of the people at the table and make the decision. There is no point in saying we will have an autism unit in a school if the teachers in the school are asking where it will be put and who the teachers who will go into it are. What you do in that case is turn the teachers against you and sending the parents into that atmosphere is a nightmare. I had that when my sons started in secondary school and I gave them all that information but they did not have enough SNAs for the 16 boys with autism they had in the school.

My son had a full-time special needs assistant, SNA, whose hours were divided, and I ended up with a child who was on suicide watch. I do not want that situation to happen to any other parent, but I have heard of it happening ever since. As I said, once the waiting lists, resourcing and all of these are resolved, it will solve all those multitude of problems, but we need to have the buy-in. There is no point in us all demonising the HSE and in putting them on the outside of the conversation. That is not going to work. Do not put the teachers on the outside of the conversation. Any teacher I have ever met has only had the best wishes and determination for their children, no matter what. The Teaching Council of Ireland has that attitude, but it is very far removed from the classroom. That is what is what I am saying. Though it might be simple, it will cost, but it is worth it for the futures of the people who I represent.