SNA services are ‘over-stretched and under-resourced’

“Keep your child up as late as possible and fill him full of sugar,” was the unorthodox advice that Joanne Duffy received when struggling to secure a special needs assistant (SNA) for her son Ronan, who has Down Syndrome.

The services are so stretched that only extremely challenging cases were likely to get the resources vital to children such as Ronan if he was to have any hope of progressing in a mainstream primary school.

In the event, Ronan from Moyvane, North Kerry, was assigned an SNA but, otherwise, State services have been thin on the ground. In the early years, he had an “amazing” domiciliary care nurse and a pre-school team courtesy of the Brothers of Charity, but little or no access to essential therapies.