John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister knows that he will not meet a more exhausted group of people in this country than the parents of children with special needs. The motion tabled by my colleague, Deputy Thomas Byrne, enables us to reinforce points that the Minister might be missing. They are things that may have come across the Minister's desk but we have the opportunity to point them out to him. I have ten pages of notes before me but I have only a minute and a half to make some salient points. In my constituency, which includes Dublin 6, Dublin 6W, and Dublin 12 - although part of that is in the constituency of my colleague, Deputy O'Callaghan - there was no ASD unit until this year. Some body is not doing its job properly. Our party leader mentioned the role of the old inspectorate to go out into individual schools and ask what they were doing could be really valuable in this regard.

Many parents have referred to new schools. This country has never had such a large school building programme but surveys of the families in the areas must be conducted prior to planning permission being given in order that schools know what proportion of children with special needs will be attending the school. New schools are being constructed without any special needs provision in them.

If a special needs child joins the school midway through the academic year, as is often the case, the time taken before the school gets sanction for special needs assistants can take months, which creates its own anomaly. These are things that the Minister can address.

A teacher told me how she was a big fan of inclusion and how she worked with special needs children every day. She constantly questions whether she is doing their best for them and colleagues do likewise. She noted that while she would not be without them, she felt that teachers are being taken for granted because no teacher will leave a special needs child behind or not give him or her the chance to achieve his or her full potential. We need more resources and more people. I have spoken to others about access to therapy of any kind, speech, occupational and so on, and the waiting lists are shameful.

I know of someone who, after being on the waiting list, was given three speech and language therapy sessions under the HSE. The box was ticked and the person was removed from the list. While that person might have needed 30 or 300 sessions, they have ticked off the Government's waiting list only to have to wait years to join the bottom of the queue again.

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