Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)

I thank Deputy Brian Hayes and his Fine Gael colleagues for tabling this motion. The debate is fundamentally about providing each child in the State with the best opportunity to reach his or her full potential and it is also about the ongoing daily anguish and frustration faced by parents who want help for their children. It is a question of how we define the price of a child's education and development and of whether we provide resources early or pay the cost later. This price is not just measurable in financial terms but also in terms of the great personal cost to those who need help now, and their families.

In recent years, the field of educational psychology has been broadened by individuals such as Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard University. Learning styles, for example, have been worked upon and it is unfortunate that great new educational concepts cannot be employed because of the difficulties in this area. We have arrived at the view that every child in the State should have full educational opportunities and we must ask ourselves why the most basic requirement of the Department of Education and Science, namely, to assess children with special needs, cannot be met as soon as possible and why an individual education plan cannot be prepared for them.

When NEPS was first established in 1999, the then Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Micheál Martin, promised the service would have 200 psychologists within five years. Clearly a commitment was broken, thus providing another example of a Government that actually lives in the moment.

Last evening, the Minister stated she attempted to keep her own election promise by making funds available for 33 extra child psychologists this year. The net increase is likely to be 16, at best, by the end of the year. When the Minister ran for election, she knew the recruitment difficulties that existed and when she was making her promise she should have known the circumstances that would now obtain. It is clear that approximately half of our primary schools have no service and Ireland has the lowest pupil-psychologist ratio in the European Union. Sadly, one must ask whether this explains why 23 school-going children died from suicide last year.

Regardless of Ireland's financial prospects, it has enjoyed unprecedented wealth in recent years and we have heard Ministers say it was awash with money. It is incomprehensible why people were going to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in recent years so that they could have assessments carried out. Eight years after the setting up of NEPS, the service has yet to reach a staffing target of 184 psychologists. The Minister stated she is on target to achieve a complement of 134 psychologists, but since 1999 the complexities of education have grown exponentially and student numbers have increased. New students are arriving from other states and the problem, as defined in 1999, has changed radically.

This debate is fundamentally about providing each child with the best opportunities to reach his or her full potential. Every day parents face the anguish associated with trying to have their child assessed. Children may require an assessment at two or three years but by the time they are five, when they should be assessed and in a school with an education plan, their parents are forced to run from school to school asking what is the best option in the absence of the information they require. There is a price being paid while we are having this debate. When the children in question are adults, we will be making funds available to make up the cost that should be met now.

See this speech in context