Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. It is important that we are having this discussion today. It is also important to recognise what I think is a really good aspiration from the Dyslexia Association of Ireland, that is, to create a dyslexia-friendly society. While it is absolutely appropriate that we would have the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, in the House, this is a wider conversation beyond education and involves the way we treat each other as citizens in this country.

The part that education has to play is that it can do one of two things: it can make people feel better about themselves or it can make them feel worse about themselves. Senator Dolan has outlined very well everything that has been achieved and everything the Minister of State has put in place over the last year since we entered government. However, it is also fair to say that there is frustration. There is a backlog of work that needs to be done, and it can only be done over a period of time. I certainly appreciate that but we also have to recognise the frustrations of young people and parents. We need to say that we are going to tackle this, that this is important to us and that this is why we made the decision to put in place a Minister of State with responsibility for special education.

It has been mentioned many times that 10% of us have dyslexia, which means many of us in this Chamber have dyslexia. I imagine that many of us do not even know, as we are standing up here, trying to read notes and struggling, because we were never diagnosed in school. That is a real challenge for people. We have very high rates of illiteracy in this country. We just do not know how much of that is linked to dyslexia. There is a further 5% to 10% of people on top of that 10% who have a language-based learning disability, so that is 20%, or one in five of us, who have a language-based learning disability, and we just do not know about it.

Recently, in the school of one of my children, the students underwent an assessment to see what kind of learners they are. It was really valuable and empowering for the children in that school to feel, "Okay, that is why I do not read or write to the same level as some of my peers, but the thing I am really good at is painting, and that is the way I learn because I am a visual learner". It is really empowering for people to understand themselves throughout their life. Not only that, it is the other four in five people who were there who then learn there are people who learn differently to them as well. That will help as we go forward into workplaces with understanding our work colleagues.

We have an opportunity to change the way that learning happens in this country, both in terms of our appreciation of other people and having that dyslexia-friendly society, and also having that real sense of self-confidence that we can participate in the world, add to it and be valuable members of our society, even if we have a language-based learning disability, or especially because of that, because we can hone our other skills and be really competent at something we are good at.