Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I understand the sentiment of the amendment but I cannot support it. To be fair, the Minister of State has more than adequately articulated prior to now - it was one of her first announcements in the Department - that there will be wrap-around supports in schools and that we will have a child-centred focus with all the attending multidisciplinary supports around that. It is a matter of recruitment and ensuring those multidisciplinary teams are in place.

Elements that are crucial and important in the amendment of section 37A include the length of time and effectiveness of the process, and ensuring the process will deliberately be more effective than it has been heretofore, as a consequence of the Government's amendment to this section of the Act. We should make sure that schools with an infrastructure are prioritised, built upon and are obliged to extend their services in secondary schools, both fee and non-fee paying schools and DEIS and non-DEIS schools, so that we have a universality of ambition to make sure the provision is as local to every child as it possibly can be and that section 37A is effective in making that happen quickly. I believe that is the intention of the Minister of State. Thus, everything around that will not just be the physical place of the child; it will also be everything that is attending to that.