Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

For most people, having a child with a disability is a major cause of stress. The struggle they go through to try to find a class for them, education facilities and all of that adds to the stress. The experience for these people is that they have to fight all the way for what they need. That should not be the case in a wealthy and well-designed democratic system. We should have an education system that deals with people and ensures that everyone can get fairness and access to education for all of their children regardless of their ability or additional needs. The situation for many children, including in my area and county, is that we see a special education class open in a school and children travel between 30 and 40 miles to it.

Then one opens closer to them and they cannot get into that one because they are already enrolled in the one that is farther away. We have a criss-cross of the State paying for transport for people to travel huge distances over and back to these schools. Some coherent mechanism needs to be put in place to get this system to work everywhere. It simply does not work. I will give an example of a situation. I received a letter on 16 March from parents of a child in St. Clare's Primary School in Manorhamilton. Their four year old son is autistic. He has been enrolled for more than 12 months in the special needs class and has been sanctioned by the SENO. He was supposed to begin next September. However, they were informed by the principal on Friday, 15 March that the class will not go ahead because the Department of Education will not be providing accommodation. Six local children in this situation are enrolled in the school. This is the first time an ASD unit was going to be opened in Manorhamilton, which is quite a large town in north Leitrim.

I asked a parliamentary question about that and received a reply which had a lot of guff in it about looking at data and what the future needs will be, when the future needs are there in front of the people. The principal of the school and the people of the community know what their needs are. They do not need someone to come up with statistical analysis of what their children want. They need to get a service and it is being denied to them. We are told they have been offered a school place to be built, but next September is a short time away in which to have that classroom in place. There is a great need for urgency in respect of it.

In Carrigallen in south Leitrim there is a school that provides special education for many children in the area, some of whom travel long distances to it from as far away as Bellanagh in County Cavan and Drumshanbo in County Leitrim. They come from all over the place because it is one of the schools that provides the service. They have some temporary accommodation in place and an application has been approved for a three-base SEN unit and they want to get it upgraded to a four-base unit. It has been going on for many months. They are future-proofing for the demand they see coming in front of them. Yet, we come back to this nonsense again of someone somewhere on a computer looking at data. That data does not reflect the reality of the people on the ground. We need to get a service put in place urgently in these schools.

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