We have witnessed a nationwide revolt against the cuts that were being implemented to SNAs and, as a result of that revolt and the threat that it will escalate, the Government has backed down. That is a great victory for the SNAs, parents, teachers and school communities who stood up, fought back and refused to accept these misguided and frankly cruel cuts. However, as the Minister has been told, the protests are going ahead tomorrow. The reason they are going ahead, from talking today to my former primary school community and the principal there today, and to others involved in the protests, is that they do not trust the Government not to have them back in a year's time where we were in the past week or two. That is basically it. The parents of children with special needs have spent every week, month and year of their children's lives fighting for adequate resources and for assessments, services and therapies they do not get most of the time. They do not trust the Government because it has failed them, and they cannot understand how it got to proposing the cuts it tried to implement last week. Simon Lewis, the principal of Carlow Educate Together National School, put it very well to me about a year ago and I said it at the time in the Dáil. When I asked him how the allocation issue could be resolved, he said to trust schools. It is as simple as that; we must trust schools, not operate on the basis of organised distrust or fear. This is what was going on if you listen carefully. The Minister for Health, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, was in my former primary school, Johnstown national school. It was at the epicentre of these cuts and was to have its SNA numbers cut from nine to 3.8. All the schools in the local area were there at a meeting. The Minister was saying that an awful lot more people are being diagnosed with special needs and asking if it was because we did not identify them before or if it is because there are more. I thought to myself that while she was asking an interesting philosophical question, it did not make a damn bit of difference to what is actually needed, which the school knows. If you listen to the school, the SNAs and the teachers, they know what is needed. We should believe them because they are not making it up. If the Government had started with that, it never would have come up with the misguided policy. The misguided policy was because of fear that the Government might have to put more resources in. That was the actual reason, and now the Government has been forced to put more resources in anyway because of the revolt. However, schools do not trust the Government not to do the same in a year's time because they have been let down so badly. They need reassurance that the Government has learned its lesson from this, that it is going to trust schools and that it is not going to treat people like numbers when it is rewriting the circular. It is an insulting circular that talks about anybody who does not have medical needs as having challenging behaviour. That is like a throwback to the 1950s and the badly behaved children. The schools want educators involved in the rewriting of that circular. We need commitments on that, and we need a recognition. We need the therapies in schools, not pilots. By the way, we need to create the places in higher and further education in order that people who want to be qualified can get qualified. I happen to know somebody who has a master's degree and a bachelor's degree and applied for the UCD course in psychology. There were nine places for 270 applicants, so she did not get it. There were 270 applicants but only nine places. We need hundreds of these people. Why are there only nine places in UCD for clinical psychology? There is about the same number for educational psychology and counselling psychology. Why are we rationing access to the education necessary to get people qualified to provide the services that children with special needs need, and that we need in the schools? It is unbelievable. Basic things need to be done, but if the Government trusts and listens to schools, does not see this as cost containment and does not see children as numbers, there might be some chance the schools will believe the Government is not going to have them in the same place in a year's time.

Sentiment score: -0.03