Letters to the Editor: Disability and education systems are causing harm to children
'Children cannot continue to bear the cost of a system designed around departmental boundaries rather than their needs.'
I wish to highlight a structural failure in Ireland’s disability and education systems that is now producing severe and avoidable harm for children nationwide.
This is not the result of individual error or isolated service gaps.
It is the predictable outcome of a system optimised for administrative throughput rather than child welfare, medical safety, or long-term public cost.
Ireland’s disability architecture operates across fragmented silos — HSE Disability, HSE Acute/Pediatrics, Education/NCSE, and Tusla.
Each protects its own short-term budget and statutory obligations.
No actor is responsible for whole-system outcomes or whole-system cost.
Decisions that appear efficient within one silo generate exponentially higher costs in another.
The removal of paediatric oversight from disability pathways is a clear example.
The Disability Act 2005 never required paediatric governance, diagnostic responsibility, or multidisciplinary medical review.
EPSEN 2004 was never commenced, leaving education without statutory assessment, planning, or appeals.
Families are forced into the assessment of need process for both health and education needs, even though AON is not a medical assessment and does not require paediatric involvement.
The HSE’s use of the term ‘primary care’ is deeply misleading: It does not mean GP or paediatric oversight, but local community therapy teams, ensuring that disabled children are routed away from medicine from the very first step.
This fragmentation is now producing a stark inequality: Children from poorer families experience delayed, shallow, or non-existent assessment, while children with resources can access private diagnostics and specialist care.
In this context, psychiatrisation becomes inevitable — not because children are psychiatrically unwell, but because the system has removed every other pathway for understanding their developmental and medical needs.
The proposed amendments to the Disability Act narrow assessments further, reduce diagnostic depth, and delay educational input.
As the ombudsman for children has warned, these efficiency-driven changes risk diluting statutory entitlements and lowering standards in response to resource constraints.
Children cannot continue to bear the cost of a system designed around departmental boundaries rather than their needs.
Government must urgently address the structural misalignment at the heart of disability and education provision.
I’d like to preface this letter by stating I completely acknowledge a wide scale of scientific literacy, interest, and faithful argumentation when it comes to the complexity of climate change.
With that said, in recent years, I have largely moved from dismay and frustration with fervent climate change deniers to feeling increasingly embarrassed through interacting with them.
Denialists continue to see their arguments falling on deaf ears and struggle to counteract the increasingly apparent evidence outside people’s windows, or through their phone screens.
Denialists regurgitate consistently rebuked talking points and repackage failing narratives with modern twists to obfuscate those who know less and to waste time with those who know more.
Thanks to improved reporting, data collection, and science communication, deniers are scrambling more than ever to paint events, such as the horrific European heatwaves, as “normal”.
People should be aware of the ever-evolving denial playback in use by those who wish to profit from climate misinformation and those who are willing, deliberately or otherwise, to do their bidding.
I will always have time for those who wish to learn more in good faith.
However, for those who insist on burying their heads in the sand, it’s time enough to see the light and join in trying to deliver a better world than the one we were born into.
There is an anomaly in the SEAI warmer homes scheme that deserves Government attention.
Eligibility is linked, among other qualifying payments, to receipt of fuel allowance.
Consequently, a State pensioner may qualify for substantial home energy upgrades, while another receiving the same State pension can be excluded because an occupational pension takes them above the fuel allowance means-test threshold.
Consider two pensioners living side by side in identical homes.
Both may be over 70, receive the State pension, face the same heating costs, and live in houses with the same poor insulation and need for energy improvements.
Yet one may qualify for significant assistance while the other is excluded simply because they contributed towards an occupational pension during their working life.
As a former ITGWU/Siptu official, I spent much of my working life advocating occupational pensions so workers could supplement the State pension and enjoy greater security in retirement.
Public policy now presents a contradiction.
Through the My Future Fund, Government encourages today’s workers to save for additional retirement income, while pensioners who already did so can find themselves excluded from valuable State supports.
Occupational pensions are not a luxury.
They represent contributions made from earnings over a lifetime of work — effectively deferred wages intended to provide dignity and security in retirement.
The Government should consider extending the warmer homes scheme to State pensioners, with greater emphasis on the energy condition and needs of their homes.
The principle is simple: We should not encourage one generation to save for retirement while penalising an earlier generation for having done precisely that.
Just a few days ago, we at Dromana House, on the Blackwater Estuary in Co Waterford, took our very last commercially caught salmon from the freezer.
Some 150 years ago, this river system was yielding well upwards of 200,000 fish a year, recorded.
This is all a damning indictment of successive governments’ policies regarding this industry.
The lack of “cop on”, as it is termed, as to how all this has come about and what to do about it, is quite astounding.
So much so one wonders, was it government policy all along, to get rid of this petulent annoyance?
Like Laurna Quirke (Saturday, August 15), I too feel let down by the HSE.
I never got called for a BreastCheck mammogram.
Nearly 52, I rang up and looked for one.
I was told I had a small lump in one breast, early-stage lobular cancer, and may need radiotherapy.
An MRI revealed it was much worse than that.
Chemotherapy, double mastectomy, radiotherapy, and 46 weeks of adjuvant chemotherapy followed.
I will always wonder what would have happened if I had my first mammogram on time when I turned 50.
Mná na hÉireann, please stand up and be counted. We have had enough already.
