Special Educational Needs Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23 ============================================================ Shane Moynihan (FF), Dublin Mid-West Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire as ucht an fhreagra sin. I appreciate the good faith of the response and thank the Minister of State for taking this on behalf of the Minister for education. One immediate point I will make, which I am sure the Minister of State's wife would empathise with, is that the application procedure for additional resources for SEN in a school is extremely onerous. Our focus should be on ensuring the resources and hours required are made available in a targeted and timely way, in the best interest of the child, especially where the school has demonstrated a need that can be met. I will delve into a few other things the Minister of State referred to in his answer and I would like him to take one or two other things to the Minister. The first is around the national framework and national guidance for an evidence-based approach to how we address dyslexia and associated speech and language difficulties in our schools. It is important it be evidence based. It is important teacher training be made available on a consistent basis. While I welcome that some specialist supports are provided in schools, there is also a need for an expansion of the reading classes the Minister of State mentioned in his reply. They do not necessarily need to be in a school setting, but the provision of more reading classes in schools is an important step in addressing the medium level of difficulty some children might have. Above all else, the reason I want to centre the importance of the national framework is that there are instances in my constituency where children in an autism special class are not able to access speech and language supports because it is not seen in the overall suite of supports provided to children in an autism class. While I am not for a second suggesting we should stop our roll-out of autism classes, I am concerned that we need to give the same level of attention to speech and language difficulties that in many cases coincide with a diagnosis of autism, but in many cases merit proper specialist supports that might be more than the SEN hours allocated to a school, that might require the opening of a reading class or, in some instances, the expansion of the reading school. Those disabilities are as important as the ones we are rightly responding to at the moment. --- 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/2026-04-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-23