Madam, - Last year the Ministers for Health and Children and for Education, together with the HSE, fought a five-year-old boy with special needs for a record-breaking 68 days in the High Court. As the State employed two full legal teams, one for the Ministers and the other for the HSE, and no expense was spared in terms of attending experts and witnesses against the child and his parents, the cost of the case will, when the accounts are done, be millions of euro.
The issue in the case was whether or not the boy should be allowed to continue to receive the ABA education that was clearly benefiting him and that his assessments recommended as appropriate, or whether he must transfer to the generic and inappropriate school placement that State policy dictated.
It is hard to reconcile the relentlessly neglectful Government and Ministers that fought this case with the same politicians I hear on the radio talking solicitously about "children's rights".
It may be of interest that the article that is most under threat of alteration in a so-called "children's rights referendum" is the same Article 42.5 that was relied upon in my son Jamie's High Court case to prove that the State must give help to a child with special needs and to the parents of the child. In the case for Jamie's right to education, the High Court accepted that Article 42.5 can mean that if a parent "fails", not from malice or neglect but because his or her child's special needs require more expertise, time, teamwork and/or strength than that parent has, then the State must help that child.
Is that interpretation of Article 42.5 one of the reasons that a Government which so often seeks to shirk its responsibilities to children with special needs wants to change the wording of the article?
Of course, the electorate would not vote for a change that would disadvantage children with special needs, so the Government will try to persuade us that its amendments are pro-child.
I hope we will not be so gullible as to believe it. - Yours, etc,
KATHY SINNOTT MEP,
European Parliament Inter-group for Family and Child Protection,
Cork.