Judges hide O' Cuanachain judgment until after the election

national | health / disability issues | news report Thursday April 26, 2007 12:46 by Miriam Cotton - Disability Election Pledge Alliance

Protest to proceed tomorrow at St Stephen's Green

The full text of the High Court judgment in the O' Cuanachain case was due to be delivered tomorrow 27th April. But they chickened out. Would this by any chance be connected to the forthcoming election? You can bet on it. It would have been interesting to see what form of casuistry they had come up with to justify this callous and discriminatory judgment.

To recap on the facts, the government have spent 5 mllion euro on defeating Sean O' Cuanachain's parents in the courts in order to prevent them from securing a teaching method proven to work with children with autism. Mary Hanafin has claimed that the Dept of Education's preferred strategy is to rely on what she calls an 'eclectic' approach. This actually translates into dumping autistic children into mainstream schools where they are entitled to a derisory maximum of 5 hours resource teaching per week. For the rest of the time the children must be fitted in as best they can by teachers who often have over-sized classes to deal with anyway. One professional psychologist has accused Mary Hanafin of substituting opinion for science.

Many teachers will have attended rudimentary seminars and workshops which provide useful pointers for how to work with autistic children. However this is not a substitute for the professional training that is required for methods such as Applied Behavioural Analysis and TEEACH, for example. There are very few teachers who have this sort of training.

There are some specialist schools and units attached to mainstream schools who are skilled to teach children with autism but more than 300 pupils are on waiting lists for those schools. The vast majority of children have no units or shcools to apply to and are rubbling along with Hanafin's electic neglect instead.

And just to remind people of the backdrop to this, the National Council for Special Education which appears to be a sort of quango dedicted to minimising access to resources, is refusing to accept privately obtained assessments. This is in a context where Hanafin has decreed that schools are entitled to an appalling 2.5 assessments on average per school per year, when most classes will have at least one child in need of an educational psychologist's assessment. In other words they are deliberately suppressing the diagnosis of autism, adhd etc.

The government can't afford to confirm yet another massive insult to people with autism with polling day so close at hand.