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

I am sharing time. I will narrow my focus, because I just have three or four minutes, to a specific aspect of the budget. Then, in the context of the finance Bill I will talk about other issues.

One of the policy issues close to my heart is the issue of special needs education, as well as the provision of many facilities, supports, backup, teachers, and hours to those children who have special needs, and meeting the requirements of these children's parents. I am very happy, therefore, to welcome that there are a number of measures in budget 2022 that go a long way towards building on my own party of Fianna Fáil's tradition of measures for children with special needs. We were the party that introduced special needs assistants, SNAs. There were no SNAs in this country or system until Fianna Fáil introduced them many years ago. I welcome the fact another 1,065 SNAs will be added to the system, bringing the total number of SNAs in the system to close to 20,000. That is some achievement, although we will continue to need more. As we provide these, the need for additional supports is clearly becoming recognised. Certain supports are floating to the top of the system and we will have to address that. One of these is the issue of outside hours for childcare for children with special needs, to afford their parents basic time to do shopping and things like that.

We need to look into funding that.

There are almost 1,000 new special education teachers to be introduced, working not just in special schools but also in special classes in mainstream settings, which is a positive development. The budget also proposes to increase the number of schools and children benefiting from supports in the DEIS programme. DEIS was introduced by my party a number of years ago and I am thrilled to see its expansion in many schools in my constituency. In addition to that, we have the extension of the school meals programme, a vital service which is provided to schools and is availed of in areas that have many challenges. It ensures that children get a warm breakfast and a lunch. It ensures that they come to school and are well nourished and in a good position to learn during the school day. The provision of additional administrative principals in special and mainstream schools is welcome.

My colleagues and I, including Deputy Jim O'Callaghan who is here today, pushed the issue of special needs education in the last Dáil. We were able to highlight that special autism spectrum disorder, ASD, units were not available in parts of our constituencies in Dublin. This has been addressed since we came into government. That measure and the provision of more SNAs to serve these schools means that traditional schools that provided ASD units, such as St. Dominic's and Scoil Mhuire in Ballyboden in my constituency, are now being joined by schools such as Bishop Galvin National School and Bishop Shanahan National School in opening ASD units. I have learned that schools which have opened these units welcome additional units to provide collaborative, professional supports to teachers. There is good news for both the parents of children with special needs and those pupils with special needs in our schools.

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