Peter Power (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

——especially in the face of complex, often conflicting, expert opinion. I am not an expert in this area. Most Members of the House are not experts. I have heard experts differ significantly on what is the appropriate response of Government and the Department on this issue, and we should recognise that nobody has a monopoly of wisdom on this issue.

The experts agree, however, that the demarcation lines between educational services for those with special educational needs and those with a varying degree of autistic spectrum disorder are blurred. It follows, therefore, that improvements in the services available for children with autism can only be looked at in the context of the enormous improvements that have been made in services available to children with special educational needs over the past ten years. It would be churlish not to acknowledge that fact. Unfortunately, that was not acknowledged last night.

The essential question in this debate should be whether we have a framework throughout the education and health services which can accommodate flexibly the changing developmental needs of children on the one hand with the diverse and emerging scientific and expert research developments on the other, coupled — most importantly — with an ongoing commitment to additional resources.

Notwithstanding that, most Members of this House support the conclusions of the taskforce on autism, which reviewed all the available evidence and concluded that there is no definitive evidence that supported one approach as better than all others or which supports a single approach for all aspects of development.

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