Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Time and time again, the families of children with disabilities have to fight and scrape to get the resources these children are entitled to. It is a challenge to get an assessment within the timeframe mandated in the Disability Act and to get their children into schools with the necessary facilities to ensure those children have a positive educational experience. The parents of children with disabilities are some of the most inspiring people you will ever meet. In the humdrum daily ritual of life, they face additional struggles that parents of other children often do not have to face. Now many of these parents will be panicking about obtaining a school place for their child for the coming August-September start date.

The programme for Government has committed to ensuring children with special educational needs have an appropriate school place, yet the recent AsIAm survey showed that at least 267 do not have an appropriate place for this coming September. No doubt the real figure is higher. What are the true figures? How many of them are in my constituency, Limerick City?

Segregated education centres cannot and never will be the answer. Ireland is never going back to any dark places like that. It is outrageous that special education centres were even suggested. Children with disabilities and specific needs have as valuable a contribution to make to this society as any of us. They deserve to be raised and taught with their peers, not isolated and segregated. Our understanding and appreciation for citizens with special needs has thankfully developed in recent years and this type of schooling arrangement is retrograde and an insult to this progress. However, the reality is that with summer holidays approaching, panicked parents will feel they have no alternative.

We have a problem, but we cannot solve the problem without the correct data. We need to know how many children do not have an adequate school place. The data are with the NCSE and the Department. We need to see those data so that emergency measures can be taken, even at this late hour, to ensure all children have an appropriate school place for September. The Minister has powers available to compel schools to open special classes, but under section 37A, the process is long, complex and time-consuming, especially for parents. We need to see this process be made more concise and streamlined so that school places can be found for these children.

Our motion has specific demands, including the immediate publication of data on the number of children without an appropriate school place for the next school year, the introduction of emergency legislation to streamline and simplify the section 37A process and an unequivocal confirmation that the segregationist education centres proposal will be immediately scrapped.

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