The INTO congress overwhelmingly passed a motion urging the Minister for Education to establish the Refugee Educational Support Service on a permanent basis and to give it the required resources. There was one dissenting vote.
Proposing the motion, Mr Donal O Loingsigh of the executive said it was time "to end the uncertainty of those in the service, who are never sure if the service is to continue from one year to the next". He said the service's five teachers were currently working "without the facility of a central resource base, which means they work in relative isolation from one another, making the storage, reproduction and sharing of materials very difficult".
Mr O Loingsigh said: "It is totally unacceptable that they should be operating without an agreed budget and that they have to spend their personal money in advance on specialised language-teaching materials and often wait months before recouping same.
"The anomaly which restricts the current Refugee Support Service to some refugees and not to others needs to be eliminated. This restriction means the support teachers are being forced to discriminate between children of refugees and other ethnic minority children who have the same needs and may sometimes be in the same school if not the same class."
He said the children had often "witnessed the most horrific atrocities, suffered family loss through massacres, torture, ethnic cleansing and civil war, and now find themselves, certainly through no fault of their own, in an unfamiliar environment without the comfort of friends and the ability to communicate with their new-found peers".
"Can you then imagine a child, for language reasons, who will not be able to ask a question, get information or explain why it might be upset? A child who is likely to experience racism and discrimination in the form of name-calling, bullying, taunting and teasing from other children."
Ms Noreen Flynn, from south Dublin, said the children of the 4,700 asylum-seekers in the country were being offered no State educational support.
"While the Departments of Justice and Education remain in the grip of administrative paralysis, vulnerable and traumatised children are being allocated to schools already designated disadvantaged."
In her school in inner city Dublin there were 15 refugee children from Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Liberia and the former Yugoslavia. Nine of them had little or no English when they came to the school. They were placed in classes of 24 to 28 disadvantaged pupils, "with an added ethnic mix of travellers".