Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

As a parent, I know only too well the high price people with special needs pay in later years if, as children, they are denied access to education, therapy and treatment. Society pays a price also because, when children are deprived of an opportunity to maximise their potential, they end up in a range of institutional care situations, including prison, unfortunately. If they do not end up fully dependent on the State, they end up at least more dependent thereon than they should be and than they need to be.

Not alone could nobody make a moral case for what is taking place, nobody could make an economic case for it. A Government that reverses pay cuts for senior civil servants and sanctions pay increases for bankers should not target disabled children and children with special needs for the most penal of cuts.

Every scheme should be reviewed, but in this case it is not a normal, ongoing review; it is a review with an agenda. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what the agenda is because there is zero transparency associated with it. Nobody knows what the review is trying to achieve and where it will end. Having got rid of special classes in mainstream schools, it seems the aim of the Government is now to get rid of special schools. Why? Does the Government seriously believe all the children now in special schools will survive in mainstream schools given that they are in special schools in the first instance because they could not survive in mainstream schools? Neither could mainstream schools cope with them; that is the reality.

Whatever chance the children have of surviving in special schools, they have no chance of surviving in mainstream schools without an SNA. The bottom line is that they will not survive. They will drop out, regress and become the statistics about which we do not want to know. They will become the statistics on homelessness and prisons. What are statistics for us represents absolute heartbreak for the children's parents. It is all in pursuit of a policy that we do not know anything about, since it has not been articulated. I now hear that the secondary schools have been informed that any school that has a teacher over the quota after September must either get rid of him or her, or an SNA. What school will get rid of a science teacher to save an SNA? The reality is that the SNA will lose his or her job and the child will lose his or her future.

The Minister cannot stand over what is going on. This review has no clear criteria, no benchmark, no published objective, no appeals system, no transparency and no accountability. It is really just a hatchet job on the most vulnerable in society and she must listen to the terms of this motion, and at least put a stop to it for now and have an appeals system put in place that has retrospection.

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