There are currently 56 families taking cases through the courts to try to force the Department of Education to give their children an education. Forty-two of them are children with special needs - many of them autistic - and 14 are children suffering from attention deficit disorder or some other problem which makes them difficult to control.

It is such an embarrassing - some might say unconstitutional - litany that the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, intends to have an end put to it with his announcement yesterday.

"Up to now special needs education has been a grace and favour system," a Department official said yesterday. "We'd find a bit of money from wherever we could to deal with the worst cases."

Such a system did little to encourage the educational participation of the estimated 4 per cent of the school-going population with disabilities. Parents fought endless and heartbreaking court battles to get their disabled children a basic education.

The atmosphere started to change after a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1997. The court decided that 12-year-old Paul O'Donoghue from Cork, quadraplegic and mentally handicapped, had the right to a free primary education and that he had been deprived of his rights to be educated like other children under Article 42 of the Constitution.

One lawyer, dealing in particular with parents of autistic children, noticed another change earlier this year. Rather than fighting cases, Department of Education officials started turning up in court and offering to find places for children with autism and speech and language problems.

It was still very long-drawn-out. One Dublin family with a daughter with severe speech problems spent seven months in and out of the High Court before finally getting her into a special school last month.

The main problem here was the chronic lack of speech and language therapists, a shortage that a few new places at third-level colleges will not solve for the foreseeable future.

Mr Martin said yesterday he was "impatient" with the issue of the lack of speech therapists getting lost between the Department of Education, the Department of Health and the health boards.

He cited the case of a special school in Cork whose opening was delayed for a year because it could not get speech therapists. An interdepartmental committee is now starting to tackle this problem.

MR Martin's language yesterday was categorical. "All children with disabilities will have a guarantee of teaching support and, if necessary, childcare support," he said. "Whatever the location and however small the numbers, they will have the automatic right to those supports."

In his press statement, he said: "Each child, whether as part of a group or on an individual basis, will have an automatic entitlement to the level of teaching and childcare support which their condition requires." More specifically, for the first time there is formal recognition of all children with autism, with a special pupil-teacher ratio of 6:1 and a childcare assistant.

A single special needs child in an isolated area will have a right to both special tuition and childcare. A class of 12 special needs children in an ordinary primary school, which previously got a resource teacher only when one was available, will now have an automatic right to one.

Children with severe or profound mental handicap will be entitled to two childcare assistants per class of six children. Ms Deirdre Hennigan of the Down's Syndrome Association said this would prevent the unacceptable situation in which a teacher in a special class, in order to take one child to the toilet, would sometimes have to "close and lock the classroom door and hope for the best". Yesterday's package was also welcomed by the Irish Society for Autism and the Disability Federation of Ireland. Mr Pat Matthews of the ISA said it was "a new beginning for those who have been condemned to a life where their education potential was never developed".

Mr Andrew Logue of the Disability Federation said the new initiative was child-centred, "focused on the assessed needs of the child" and "not on cost". He also praised its complementary combination of childcare and education, and the new provision for individuals and small groups of children, which would particularly benefit rural children.

The one criticism Ms Hennigan had was that the initiative did little to fill the "huge gap" at second level. She pointed to a lack of any concessions to Down's Syndrome children either in the Junior Certificate or Leaving Certificate examinations.

Department sources conceded there was still work to be done here. However, they emphasised that the package's childcare provisions would also apply to second-level schools, and promised other complementary action at second level before next September.