Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to share my time with Deputies Kathleen Lynch, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, Liz McManus and Joan Burton.

I am saddened but, sadly, not surprised by the assertive nature of the Minister's contribution. The contradictory nature of her comments is of little or no comfort to the parents and others who, for reasons they best know, believe that part of the educational doorway for their children is one-to-one ABA teaching. They are not denying the effects of mainstreaming. In fact, they would dearly love to have a mainstream child. They are not denying the attractiveness of a special class within a mainstream environment whereby the inadequacies, in educational terms, of their child can be dealt with in a peer group but play time, assembly time and all other things can be normalised, so that the child may very well join his or her sister and brother in the playground and go on a normal journey to school with them every day.

All this motion, which the Labour Party supports unreservedly, asks is that the Minister recognise the validity of one-to-one teaching for some children, for some period of time. The Minister cited the ABACAS experience, which refers to a graduation from a one-to-one to a special needs school. Her remarks are contradictory because when one parses and analyses her speech, she said there is no one preferred method, there is no one-size-fits-all, yet she is not prepared to extend the capacity of the ABACAS school, even though there is a queue the length of her arm of distraught parents trying to get their children into it.

I was fortunate to visit the school in Drogheda and to see, at first hand, the teaching methods used there. I also saw, at first hand, as the parent of children myself, the scale of difficulty that some young people had to cope with, in terms of their own barriers to learning to learn. As Cormac Rennick described it so vividly "the difference between our kids and normal kids" is that most kids automatically and intuitively learn behaviour by observing, by participating and by copying their older brothers and sisters, parents and friends on the street, but children with autism do not. We are only on the threshold of knowledge on this. We know very little about it, despite what has emerged in the past few years. I have a brother who is an international expert in the territory. He is well established in his work in Canada and the United States in the area of ADHD and related learning difficulties. There is a spectrum of ignorance, not a spectrum of knowledge, which this generation is picking at in terms of trying to find out what it is that makes one child different from another.

It is against this background that there is a cry coming from some parents in this country, citizens of this Republic, to please, for God's sake, give them the opportunity, for a short period of time, to have one-to-one teaching for their children so they can learn to learn. Yet, the Minister's speech is assertive, declaratory and of the "we've never had it so good", "look at where we've come in ten years" variety. Of course we should have come that distance in ten years. We are the second richest country in Europe. We have money coming out of our ears, a lot of which has been wasted by the Minister's colleagues, yet we cannot seem to reach out and provide the sort of resources needed for the ABACAS schools.

That is the net point of this motion and not seven pages, which deprived the Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Jimmy Devins, from making his own contribution, on what is happening in all the other areas.

See this speech in context