Special Needs Assistants: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-04 ============================================================ Frances Black (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Acting Chairperson. The Minister of State is welcome to the Chamber. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the topic of SNAs. What we are talking about is not policy or procedure but real children in real classrooms who depend on real people to help them to access their education and their futures. Special needs assistants are not a luxury and, as my colleague just said, they are not an optional extra that schools are fortunate to have. They are fundamental, essential and, in the truest sense of the word, irreplaceable members of our school communities. SNAs are advocates and champions for children who may not yet have the words or the means to advocate for themselves. Every day in schools throughout this island they walk through those doors and they make it possible for children with additional needs to participate, to learn and to belong. That is vital. It is everything. My concern is that the trust that SNAs, families and schools placed in this State has been deeply damaged. The decisions and actions taken by the Government and its agencies have left people feeling unheard, undervalued and genuinely worried about what comes next. Rebuilding that trust will not happen overnight. It will require consistent, sustained and meaningful engagement and genuine partnership with stakeholders. I want to be clear about what is at stake if we get this wrong. Reducing or removing SNA support is not a neutral administrative decision. It has huge consequences that ripple outwards for children and teachers. We will feel these consequences, and when we do, we will wish we had acted differently. Providing adequate SNA support is, as others have said, a constitutional obligation. Every child in the State has the right to an appropriate education. It is enshrined in our Constitution and it falls to the State to honour that right in full, not in part, and not when convenient but always. When we fail to meet the needs of our most vulnerable children, we are not just failing those children and their families. We are failing ourselves as a society. We are failing the very values we claim to hold. How we treat those who are most in need is the true measure of who we are. I want to speak for a moment on the nature of the SNA role. Sometimes it can be misunderstood. There has been discussion about redeployment and comparisons drawn with teachers. However, these roles are fundamentally different in one critical respect. Teachers obviously deliver a curriculum. The difference is that SNAs build real relationships. It is the relationships, trust, understanding and the bond formed between an SNA and a child that makes everything else possible. Social and emotional regulation, which is the foundation of a child's ability to engage and learn, does not happen in a vacuum. It happens within that relationship. Take away that relationship and you take away the scaffolding that holds that child's school experience together. Any policy around redeployment must recognise this with care, sensitivity and nuance. This is not a numbers exercise. It really is about human connection. The Government must learn from what has gone wrong. Every misstep carries a lesson. This is a moment, a genuine opportunity to step back, listen and reset. I believe we have the capacity to do that now. What we need is not tinkering at the edges but fundamental reimagining of how we educate children and how we treat people with disabilities. We need to move with real commitment towards a model of inclusive education, one where no child is left behind, no child is sidelined and where our schools reflect the full, rich diversity of our society. That means starting from first principles, acknowledging the constitutional right of every child to an appropriate education and then building a properly resourced, properly supported and properly staffed system that delivers on that right. It means recognising that SNAs are not peripheral to the system; they are central to it. We must be honest about the scale of what is required and bring humanity back into our classrooms and into our policies. We owe it to children with additional needs, to people with disabilities and to their families to build an education system that is truly inclusive, where every child has the support needed to participate, learn and thrive. --- 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/2026-03-04/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:43+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-04