Dr. Niall Muldoon:

The basic premise of any department of education is to provide a school place to start with. The CSO is one of the best organisations in the world for gathering statistics. We should have enough information within the schools and with the Department of education now being linked in with preschools to know how many children with special needs are coming into our system right from the start. It has been promised that this will now happen a year in advance, which it should. We will wait to see. We were promised that two years ago, when we put out our first report on planning for places, but we still ended up with 300 children being unable to get places that year. Last year, something like 125 could not get places. We hope that issue will be eliminated because it requires a lot of energy on the part of the poor parents and the children. The Deputy will know better than I would that there was a real problem in Dublin 15. Some 13 schools have come together to create a single application, which is wonderful, but they are still highly oversubscribed. At least people are only getting one refusal. There is a negative impact of parents from getting 20 refusals from 20 schools about their child. It is not just a "No" letter; it is a "No" letter to their child.