THE mother of a 19 year old profoundly handicapped youth challenged the Minister for Education yesterday to evict her son from the special school where he has spent the past three years.
Mrs Pat O'Hanlon has refused to have her son, Ryan, moved to a vocational training centre elsewhere, insisting it could not provide for his needs.
She returned him to the school in Cork yesterday morning after the summer holiday break and said she will continue to bring him there each morning until the Department of Education agrees to give him a full time place.
St Paul's School is run by the COPE Foundation. Ryan joined the six others in the class, bringing the total to seven, which was one more than should be in the class, according to a court decision won by another Cork mother four years ago.
Other members of the Cork branch of the Association for Severely and Profoundly Mentally Handicapped turned up at the school to support Mrs O'Hanlon's action and afterwards joined a picket of the Department's Cork offices.
She has turned down a proposal from the Department to place her son on a vocational training course which it said has been devised to suit his level of handicap. She said an assessment of Ryan had shown he had made considerable progress in the special school and a change would not be good for him.
The vocational course was little more than a babysitting service to facilitate the throughput of handicapped people through the system, she claimed.
A statement from the Department of Education said both it and the authorities at the COPE Foundation were satisfied that, given Ryan's age, the vocational training centre was the most appropriate place for him.
The school he had attended for the past three years was for children aged from five to 18 years. A special support programme would be available to him in the training centre.