Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-24
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

First of all, as we have outlined already - I said it last week in response to Deputy Bacik - any additional SNAs that were identified by the council as being required by a particular school will get this in the context of that review, so they will get that. The funding is additional to the education budget and will not be taken from any other part of the education budget.
It is not an initiative without a plan. The Government never signed off on this at a governmental level, and I would just make that point to the Deputy. The Government did not sign off on this in terms of the 550, and the scale and the impact of it. When the Government saw the impact of this, it considered it and decided not to go ahead with what was being proposed, and that there will be no reductions in the next school year, and that prior to anything happening, there is a redeployment plan, which, by the way, was sought by the unions - in my view, correctly so. Teachers have had that since the late 1980s. I think it was Kieran Mulvey who negotiated that, with others, on behalf of the teacher unions back then. If schools reduced their numbers, teachers could be redeployed to other schools. If children with special needs are reduced by a natural process, and move on to second level or whatever, the SNAs, rather than being made redundant, will be redeployed to another school as close as possible to the school where they operate. That is a good, positive thing. It is very positive and progressive.
In terms of workforce planning, there is an issue, or perhaps not an issue, but we need to take care to protect SNAs and that they are not asked to do everything in a school. Normally, the process is that the school says it has such a cohort of children in the school who require care and support, and it will require so many SNAs. That gets reviewed or assessed by the National Council for Special Education, and it makes a deliberation on that. There is a process for doing that. It has a panel, which can hear appeals from schools. That is normal, and it has been happening.
What has happened in the last two to three years is that only schools that submitted for an increase were considered by the National Council for Special Education. There was not an overall review. An overall review was initiated, but before the outcome of that was comprehensively brought to a conclusion, action was taken in terms of what happened with correspondence going out to schools and so forth. Out of that, many schools gained, and some would have stayed the same and will stay the same. There will be no reductions next year. We will have the workforce planning, which has to happen, and is a good thing. There is also a new circular, which will have some changes compared to the 2014 circular, and the redeployment scheme. It is only then that we should look at a review process. Again, that is with a view to having consideration of the children who need the support. They have to be uppermost in our consideration.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-24