The Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, has announced a package of measures aimed at providing thousands of children with disabilities with an automatic right to an education for the first time.
It will provide a formal system of both education and childcare for primary school children who have been assessed as having special educational needs.
These cover physical and mental disability, serious behavioural problems, specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia, speech and language disorders, hearing and visual impairment. There are at least 18,000 such children in primary schools.
Until now it has sometimes taken long-drawn-out court cases before the Department of Education has provided them with schooling. There are currently 56 such cases before the courts.
Mr Martin said yesterday he wanted to ensure that "children shouldn't have to go to the High Court for an entitlement to get an education".
He said from now on, every child assessed as having a special educational need would have an "automatic entitlement" to special extra teaching or school-based childcare or both, depending on the child's specific needs.
For the first time, children with autism will also be recognised as having special needs and will get a pupil-teacher ratio in special schools of 6:1, plus the right to a childcare assistant. Until now autistic children were often sent to unsuitable schools for emotionally disturbed or mentally handicapped children.
Where several special needs children attend an ordinary school or adjacent schools, they will get a full-time resource teacher or a child care assistant or both, depending on their numbers and the severity of their disabilities.
Where individual or small groups of children are involved - for example in isolated rural areas - they will get part-time extra teaching or childcare, or both. "Flexibility of response is essential. Every case needs to be assessed on its individual merits, with the level and type of response reflecting the special need involved," said Mr Martin.
In special schools, classes of six children with severe or profound mental handicap will be entitled to two childcare assistants for each class.
Mr Martin urged boards of management to tell the Department of any children with special needs in their schools; until now the Department had often been "the last to know".
The new measures will cost nearly £4 million next year and will provide an extra 65 teaching posts and about 200 childcare jobs. They were enthusiastically welcomed by the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Irish Society for Autism and the Down's Syndrome Association of Ireland.