Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will be talking about the same issue. I did not know Senator Lombard was going to talk about it. I also request a debate with the Minister of State with responsibility for special education on special schools and special needs assistants, SNAs, and teachers in particular. It is important to recognise the amount of funding announced in the budget last month. Some €2.6 billion has been ringfenced for special education. That is 27% of the educational funding in total. As part of that, there will be an extra 1,194 SNAs right across the country which is really significant and is going to bring us up to approximately 20,000 SNAs. We need to discuss the role of SNAs and the importance of the role they play. I think we would all agree that financially we are not recognising the important role they play-----