Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for her reply but this sort of reply drives me round the twist. The first paragraph of the reply is a classic case of the Department saying it is somebody else's problem: "The board of management of each school is responsible for the care and safety of all of the pupils in their schools...Schools are not required to report such interventions to the Department." It is not, therefore, up to the Department. Mr. Paddy Connolly, CEO of Inclusion Ireland, stated that the NCSE has asked the Department on three occasions to provide best practice guidelines. That has not happened but, according to this reply, it will respond to the NCSE by June 2019.

I accept this is not the Minister of State's area of responsibility but I want her to impress on the Minister for Education and Skills, the Minister of State with responsibility for disability and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, who are responsible, that there is no sense of urgency in this reply. I get the impression from this that everything is fine and tickety-boo, there are ways for people to complain, the Department received only one complaint, and so on. There is nothing in the reply that makes me feel that the people who wrote it have read what I have read into the record today in respect of children being locked in toilets, having their faces held down on bus transport or in classrooms, or being isolated in small rooms. Nobody is suggesting that this is an easy job but a report such as this should have made Departments react in a different way from this classic response of, "It is not really our responsibility, it is somebody else's responsibility. We are looking at it and will come back to you in due course". If anybody in this House was told that a child of theirs had been locked in the toilet or gone through any of the events raised in this report, I am sure there would be hell to pay but I do not get a sense from this reply that the Department has that feeling. I reiterate that if this was taken seriously, there would be a Minister with responsibility for the area. Will the Minister of State impress on those responsible the need to do something a little more urgent and impressive to give us the sense that they are taking this matter seriously? If I was the mother or father of one of these children with disabilities who have gone through these events and this response was produced, I would not be impressed.