Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

While I welcome the Minister of State's willingness to meet the affected parents, the reply is the same bureaucratic answer we are getting from St. John of God community services. Special needs assistants are not a replacement for residential services. The whole point of the school was that it provided vocational supports, which are not provided by special needs assistants who provide support with the mainstream academic curriculum. That is not the point of St. Augustine's special school. All of the parents stated in the strongest possible terms that the reason they sent their children to the school was its vocational aspect, in other words, the training for life provided by the staff employed by the Health Service Executive, as opposed to staff employed by the Department. The parents want this service retained. They have been robbed of the basis on which they sent their children to the school. All of them made it clear that their children would have been eaten up - that is how they put it - in mainstream school, whereas they were flourishing in St. Augustine's special school. It is not acceptable that all of the things that have helped them to flourish and are giving them the opportunity to participate equally in life will be lost under the plan. I hate the word "streamlining" because it is always a euphemism for cutting and scaling down rather than scaling up. Any badly needed improvement in other services in Dún Laoghaire should not be made at the expense of vulnerable children in St. Augustine's special school. New services must be additional and not result in services being taken away from young children in the school.

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