Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of issues following on from yesterday's second meeting of the Joint Committee on Autism. We met with the Minister of State at the Department of Education, Deputy Madigan, the Irish National Teachers Organisation and the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland. One common theme that has come up over the past couple of meetings in particular is the issue of the summer provision. We have a situation at present where a significant number of special schools in the country are not providing the summer provision. In fact, the children whom the summer provision was set up for in the first instance three-to-four years ago are the ones who are not getting it and they are the children who are most in need.

There are parents struggling to get teachers and special needs assistants to do the home provision. The reason we set it up was to look after those children with high needs and they are now not getting the provision. We need to look at it, if it is not too late, for the last two weeks of July. Every special school in the country should be compelled to provide the provision. We need to look at what they have done in Newbridge about which I spoke to Senator Wall yesterday where the four schools in the town have come together and each year at least one of the schools will provide that provision to make sure that the children in that area get what they are entitled to, what they need and what they deserve.

I also want to raise the issue of the Irish Athletic Boxing Association, IABA. It is an issue I have raised regularly here over the past 12 months. The governance review report was published following the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media, of which I am a member, asking the IABA to come in to the committee to tell us that there as was nothing wrong with the association. The report has 64 recommendations, none of which refer to the people who are in charge of the sport who have been in the public domain for a long number of years.

If we are to move on with the sport and with the IABA, we need to do it by removing those who are in charge of the association. We saw 30 volunteers suspended last year in the middle of elections, the results of which still have not been announced despite the vote having taken place. All 30 of those won their case when they had to go at their own expense to defend themselves through Sport Dispute Solutions Ireland. That result has never been published because the IABA does not want it published.

We had the situation in the past three weeks where the issue with regard to the Bernard Dunne case and two directors was put before the IABA internal disciplinary committee of three independent solicitors. It has been in the media over the past 12 to 18 months. That result has never been published but the result is that unanimously those two individuals won their case and it was thrown out. There is a vote this weekend in relation to this review and I believe, for boxing to move forward, we need to remove those who have been at the helm of this organisation for the past eight or nine years and have been at the root of many of the problems within the association.