Every pound spent on emotionally and psychologically disabled children before the age of eight is better value than £100 spent on them after that age, the INTO president has told the primary teachers' union annual congress.
Mr Tony Bates told the congress, which opened in Ennis, Co Clare, yesterday evening, that these children, with their often difficult and challenging behaviour, were in almost every school in Ireland.
Many of them got suspended or dropped out of school of their own accord; up to 900 children each year failed to complete primary education.
"They are often aggressive and may even constitute a danger to themselves and others in the classroom," said Mr Bates, who is the principal of a school for young offenders in Clonmel, Co Tipperary.
"These children were not born with special needs. Their difficulties arise because of particular traumas which they have experienced. They cope with these traumas in maladaptive ways which are not acceptable to civilised society. Consequently they often evoke a desire for punishment and retribution in others, rather than an empathy and a willingness to address their particular needs.
"These are the children who are on the margins of society, who know poverty and substance abuse and often violence. They are disaffected, angry and hostile. They leave school early, either because they cannot cope with the demands of the curriculum or because it doesn't seem relevant to their particular needs."
He asked that the Government provide the facilities to ensure that "these special needs children find school a rewarding and relevant place to be, a place that will restore their dignity and give them a stake in the future".
Mr Bates also made an appeal for all the 120 special schools catering for the needs of children with physical, sensory, cognitive, emotional and behavioural disabilities, and for those pupils in special classes in primary schools and integrated into mainstream primary school classes.
He said all the reports and research had been written and the recommendations made, and now was the time for action, "and action costs money".
However, it was now clear that Ireland had the money. He quoted the Labour leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, saying last month that Ireland would soon have a GNP "on a par with the richest countries in Europe".
The Government was spending £330 million on putting IT into schools, setting up Transition Year programmes and eliminating third-level fees. There had been no voices raised against this spending: "Is this because the loudest voices in the country represent the children who would benefit most from this investment?"
He said it was time for a Department of Education audit to evaluate progress since the 1993 Report of the Special Education Review Committee. Noting the "crisis situation" in many special schools, he urged the Department to implement the report's remaining pupil-teacher ratio recommendations, to introduce a "weighting system" for special needs pupils in mainstream classes and appoint classroom assistants.
Mr Bates referred to a recent INTO report which showed the "appalling" staffing shortages in primary schools. Schools could not find qualified teachers for permanent positions; remedial teachers were trying to deal with up to 10 schools each; more than 900 schools had no access to remedial services; and there was "a daily lack of qualified substitute teachers in almost every part of the country, with the result that hundreds of schools are forced to employ untrained personnel to babysit children when a class teacher is legitimately absent".
He urged that the intake into the colleges of education should be increased by another 800 students a year over the next five years.