Special Educational Needs
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-18
============================================================

Nicole Ryan (SF), Administrative Panel

I thank the Minister of State. I hear what he is saying, but when the Taoiseach himself says that schools are used to appealing, it should not have to get to that point. Schools should not have to appeal these decisions. What happens to those appeals now while it is paused? Are they going to go through? Are those SNAs still going to be in the schools in the mainstream classes? That is the issue. The schools need SNAs. They need SNAs in the ASD classes, but also in the mainstream classes. It should not get to this point where the parents and the whole community are so outraged that they put so much pressure on the Government. Thank God they did because this would not have stopped at all. There would have been no pause had this not been so opposed by parents and across the whole of Ireland.
The issue is that we are saying that we want kids to have the education and all the supports, yet we are silently undermining all of that by removing the mainstream SNAs into a different post. That is not valuing our SNAs, or they work that they do. They do critical work. Every single one of us knows the work that they do. They go above and beyond for each child. They nurture the child. It does not just impact the children who have the additional needs in the classroom. It impacts the whole classroom. All the children will suffer. What happens now to the schools that appealed? Are their appeals going to go through, are they paused or are they going to be reinstated back into the class?

---

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/2026-02-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:39+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-18