Special Educational Needs Seanad Éireann — 2025-05-28 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel That all sounds amazing. The funding is desperately needed. I get the staffing issue. Would there be a way to alleviate that issue through special needs assistants that are qualifying and need to do a placement? Would it be an option to try to get their placement as a summer camp? Similarly, special education teachers who are qualified and vetted need to do some training or placement. Could we look at giving something like that to this service so they are not just going into a classroom and are not just doing their placement and ticking a box, but are actually bringing another service into the system whereby they are supplying a summer camp for these children? That would mean they would be getting their placement and the children would be getting a benefit from it outside of school. It is something that we were thinking could be looked at to kill two birds with one stone. --- 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/2025-05-28/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:52+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-05-28