Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate and like Deputy Cregan, I believe there has been an effort by some in the Opposition - I do not want to tar everybody with the same brush - to misrepresent the facts. The Minister's contribution last night sought to clarify as best he could the position and other speakers have been helpful in that regard.

The needs of children with disabilities are not served by misleading people and developing inflammatory statements. It would be helpful if some people sought to understand the facts rather than trying to score cheap political points at a time like this on the backs of children and families who are, by their nature, dealing with some very real difficulties in their lives. I hope we can have a balanced debate; some contributions from the other side have been balanced while others have not.

The most important issue is for children with mild general learning disabilities to have and continue to have additional teaching resources made available to them to support their education. That is correct and fitting and something we would all support. All primary schools have been given resources to cater for children with mild and general learning disabilities and each school is given an allocation of resources and learning support teachers under a special scheme, the general allocation model, which was introduced in 2005.

That is only right. For far too long we had a structure in place which did not involve the school principal. Generally, nobody is in a better position to decide how the educational needs of children in a particular school can be catered for than the principal. I welcomed the introduction of that model because it sought to put the principal and teaching staff centre stage in developing the necessary system to deal with the various levels of ability of children. We act with regard to children who are not identified as having disabilities, but within this group there are children with very different abilities and we leave it to teaching staff to deal with the matter. This is in addition to the school's allocation of classroom teachers, and the additional allocation has not been withdrawn.

There is a special case in west Clare, in St. Senan's national school in Kilrush. This school is caught in the middle because there are only three children in a particular class, with the difficulty being that these children have profound disabilities. A solution must be found to cater for their needs. The general learning class which was used was the only one appropriate at the time. We need to develop a different system for such children.

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