Special Educational Needs
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-19
============================================================

Pádraig O'Sullivan (FF), Cork North-Central

I welcome the pause, but, obviously, a pause is not a permanent solution. It is not a binding decision and everybody in this House is going to be watching with interest what happens over the next few weeks.
We in Fianna Fáil have always prided ourselves on being the party of education. The number of SNAs in the country has increased by 45% since I became a TD. That is a good story but in the past week we have somehow upscuttled a lot of that progress and good work. I join Deputy Boyd Barrett in calling for a cessation of any cuts in this academic year. One thing I learned as a teacher was that SENOs always did reviews, and they were always ongoing. They were annual in nature, so nobody faced a cliff edge in terms of cuts to services. We have to go back to a scenario where the reviews are ongoing. Diagnosis takes place at various times throughout the year. The needs of a school change over the course of a year and we need to have built-in headroom in terms of the allocation of resources going forward.

---

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/dail/2026-02-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-19