Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that the possibility of online remote learning pairing is an option for those very high-risk teachers and students. I am speaking, however, about those people with a rare disease. I have had the pleasure of working with many of them. Rare diseases are awfully misunderstood. There is often not a huge degree of knowledge within general practice, and often the patient becomes the expert in that disease relating to other international bodies. While I understand that returning to school is the best possible option in the broad scheme of things, we must understand that in circumstances where we all juggle risk in every part of our day, we make risk calculations. We must trust parents of people with a rare disease or where there is a family member with a rare disease that returning to school is not safe. We must trust those families to make that decision. I urge the Department to be flexible on this point. It is not about opening the floodgates. It is about trying to trust those families.

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