Special Educational Needs Seanad Éireann — 2023-05-09 ============================================================ Patrick O'Donovan (FG), Limerick County I have a fair few family members in west Cork. Even though Cork is an adjoining county to my own county, I would be in Dublin faster than I would be down to see some of them. The distances are not only great, but they are complicated. I can only imagine what it must be like to be the parent of a young child from Baltimore, Ballydehob, Schull, Goleen, Bantry or any of the places on the Beara Peninsula or the Sheep's Head Peninsula. It must be difficult. A compelling case has been made for the inclusion of geographical impediments. It cannot just be determined on the basis of a population of 210,000 or 147,000. I mean no disrespect to the Senator from County Kildare, but there is no comparison between a population base of 147,000 in County Kildare or County Limerick and a population base of 147,000 in west Cork. I will pass on to the Department of Education the geographical impediments raised by the Senator. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2023-05-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:52+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-05-09