Special Educational Needs Dail Éireann — 2025-10-01 ============================================================ Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan I thank the Minister of State. I sent the OT report to the NCSE on 9 June last year. I do not know whether that report had previously been submitted to the NCSE but I know mountains of documentation were submitted. Just to give a sense of this, after all the assurances that this was going to be dealt with in July, the email I received on 21 August stated: I appreciate your ongoing attention for the enclosed. Duly confirming as per recent correspondence to the school, all documentation and information relating to the SNA review for the school has been recorded by the NCSE and provided to the SNA review panel. No further application or information is required at this time. I had to respond to the NCSE to say I did not know what that meant and to ask what I was supposed to tell the family. On 26 August, I received an email from the NCSE stating that it appreciated my follow-up correspondence and confirmed that the outcomes of all outstanding SNA reviews were due to issue to the school as soon as possible in the first week of September. Then we go on, waiting for the first week in September. No update arrived. On 9 September, indication was given to the school that the review was complete and that the school remained at one SNA. The school is back a number of weeks at that stage. Sonny could not go. This child had a full-time SNA in preschool and then it has essentially been withdrawn from him. Since then, we have been trying to raise these issues. In all of the correspondence I receive from the NCSE, officials finished with this absolutely insulting line: "Schools are expected to operate within their existing allocation." There are two children in the school who both need a full-time SNA and there is one SNA. One of the children is going to miss out and at the moment it is Sonny because he is the newest child in the school. When I first started engaging with the NSCE on this particular issue, I thought the case was clear-cut and it was so blatantly obvious that this would be resolved fairly quickly. The fact that it is not concerns me. How many Sonnys are there the length and breadth of the State whose parents do not have the wherewithal or even the energy to knock on the doors of their local TDs and have them do some of the fighting for them? If TDs are getting information from the NCSE that is turning out not to be actually what is happening, what are parents being told? That is a serious question. This particular issue needs to be addressed but we need to make sure there are no Sonnys out there who are being denied their school place because of incompetence - and that is what this is. --- 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/2025-10-01/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:00+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-10-01