Parents, teachers and advocacy groups will protest outside Leinster House when the Dáil returns next week over plans to reduce the number of special needs assistants in schools.
A group calling itself the Alliance Against Cuts in Education said today that children with special needs, as well as those without, would suffer as a result of such cuts.
Chairman of the group Tomás Ó Dúlaing, who is principal of Griffeen Valley ET National School in Lucan, Dublin, said they were “the cruellest and most inhuman cutbacks” he had witnessed in his 31 years of teaching.
Mr Ó Dúlaing said children with special needs returning to primary and secondary schools last week had been greeted on the first day with “a devastating array of cutbacks that, collectively, constitute a hammer-blow to their potential development”.
He said some 10 per cent of one-to-one resource-teaching hours had been cut, SNA support had been “halved or eliminated” and that this was happening in classrooms with a further increase in the pupil-teacher ratio.
There are currently just over 10,800 special needs assistants (SNAs), although a cap of 10,575 was set by the previous government. The current Government proposes cutting the numbers back to the original cap, a move which protesters say will leave some of the most vulnerable in society without the support they need.
The Department of Education has said the cuts are "regretful", but it insists that children with special needs will receive support.
Mr Ó Dúlaing, who was joined by parents and SNAs at a press conference in Dublin, said children with special needs had the human right to fulfil their potential in the education system.
“The shameful attacks on these vulnerable children engaged in by Fine Gael and Labour amount to a savaging of that basic human right.”
He accused Taoiseach Enda Kenny of "double-speak" when he said that children with special needs would have access to "support". He said his group would give the returning "cabal" of politicians a "fitting welcome back" to Leinster House during its protest at 4pm next Wednesday.
He said the group was a "loose alliance" that anyone concerned about the issue was welcome to join.
Joan Laverty, a special needs teacher whose job has been cut, said the Government's plans would affect all children as teachers struggled to meet daily demands. “It affects not only the special needs children in the class. I don’t think parents really appreciate the extent [to which] this travels."
John Stone, a parent from Wexford, said there were moral, ethical and social imperatives behind the reasons why the cuts should not be implemented. There was also a financial imperative, he said. It made more sense to spend, say, €70,000 per child over five years on early interventions rather than "several million" to pay for institutionalised care later in life.
Mr Stone said the future and the prospects for such children were not “low-lying fruit” or easy pickings. There was a future for them where early interventions could allow them to reach their full potential and to go one to become taxpayers and members of the electorate.