Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This will help to break through many of the stigmas attached to the issue of autism.

We want a status report at the end of this month on the provision of special education classes for children with additional needs, and we want movement on the national autism strategy. We have been calling for a national autism strategy for years. We stand with parents who are absolutely exhausted dealing with a challenging diagnosis in their families, who expected to be able to turn to the State for help, support and compassion, but who then realised they had to go to war with the State for any sort of provision, for basic interventions, even for an assessment. We want to stand with the special needs assistants who work with these children every single day but who have had to break through a legacy of disrespect over the past number of years.

It is only because they joined the Fórsa trade union in large numbers that they have achieved some sort of breakthrough. The Department is telling me, through replies to parliamentary questions, that the publication of allocations for this year will be done on the basis of a similar timeframe to last year, which was in the last days of May. Again, this shows no respect for special needs assistants who are holding schools and often families together. We stand absolutely with our special needs assistants.

Again, I cannot place all of the blame with the Minister with regard to the leaving certificate because there are forces which are quite conservative and which do not want to see change. The Minister wants to see change, and she did offer some solutions as to how we can take the burden away from students at the end of sixth year. We have seen the activism and energy of leaving certificate students through the pandemic years. The Minister did listen to them, did respond to them and did platform them, and that is to her credit, but we have to break through and have radical change to the leaving certificate, which is essentially the same exam as when I did it almost 30 years ago.

On DEIS and disadvantage, I know the Minister will say there is historic investment in DEIS and that €37 million has been put into the DEIS programme. However, it is not going to benefit acutely disadvantaged students by giving a quarter of the schools in Ireland DEIS status. We need a re-evaluation of the most acutely disadvantaged schools, we need an extra designation for those who are acutely disadvantaged, as I have described, and we need to return to the vision of a 15:1 ratio that Niamh Breathnach had in the context of her Breaking the Cycle scheme. We have to return to the vision of free education that we speak about so often in these Houses. Again, the Minister has had success in this regard because there are going to be free schoolbooks in primary schools from September. We congratulate her on that. However, we have to move further and ban voluntary contributions. We need to have free school books at second level. We need to make sure that no parent in this Republic is worried about having an interface with the school because they are going to be asked for money. This is what happens. They are less likely to go to the school gates, less likely to go to a parent-teacher meeting and less likely to be involved with a parents' association, which is effectively a fundraising body, because they will be asked for money. We should have more ambition in that regard.

We need to move on the Minister's ambition to have 400 multidenominational schools by 2030. The process is failing because the church holds all the cards. I was stunned by the Taoiseach’s remark last week to the effect that he does not believe in forced secularisation of the Irish education system. He clearly believes in forced separation, because the education system here is obsessed with separating children; we are obsessed with separating them on the basis of religion, on the basis of gender and on the basis of income.

On income, let us stop subsidising private schools. If a school wants to be elitist or exclusionary, that is fine. We should let it be. However, let us stop backing such schools with State money.

On gender, outside of the Arab world, Ireland has more gender-segregated schools than anywhere else. We need to challenge that. Within ten years, we can have a situation where we phase out gender segregation in primary schools. We can do it in secondary schools within 15 years.

We have a vision for education that is inclusive and that will lift the experience of every child. We in the Labour Party know that poverty is a thief. Poverty steals childhoods, imagination and ambition. Poverty humiliates. If you are in a family that does not have access to funds in order to pay for a schoolbook, to pay for a uniform or to pay the voluntary contribution, it is the humiliation that grinds you down, and education is the only thing that will ever set you free. If people think the investment in what we are talking about here is expensive, what is more expensive is a life without education. That is much more expensive than any of the measures we are proposing. We are asking for more vision on school building, on school places, on school transport, on special education, on autism, on SNAs, on the leaving certificate, on disadvantage, on multidenominational schools and on producing an education system which is worthy of a country that pretends to call itself a republic.

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