Flooding the Zone
I want to flag something we are seeing again and again in recent commentary from the Taoiseach. Last night, Micheál Martin responded to a question from Holly Cairns in the Dáil about SNAs and classroom support. On the surface, it sounded like engagement. In reality, it was something else entirely. It was flooding the zone. If you work in education, disability, or inclusion, you already know this tactic. When challenged on a specific, urgent, practical problem, the response widens the lens so dramatically that the original issue becomes blurred. Adjacent policies are introduced. Future schemes are referenced. Long-term aspirations are rolled out. And suddenly nobody is quite sure what question is being answered anymore. That is exactly what happened here.
As someone trying hard to stay measured on this, and who fully accepts that extra SNAs are not always the answer, I want to be clear about what was actually being asked. Holly Cairns pushed on the other-needs piece. Not just the child in distress, but the rest of the class, and the teacher. The reality of what happens in a room when a child is dysregulated, overwhelmed, or in crisis. She asked plainly what the teacher is meant to do in that moment, and what about the up to 27 other children. That question matters. We urgently need clarity on it, because this is not theoretical. This is what it looks like in real classrooms. A child who cannot come up the stairs because anxiety has taken hold. A child who runs from the room because their nervous system is overwhelmed. A child sitting in a corridor crying because they are emotionally flooded. And inside the classroom, one adult remains, trying to hold the learning, the safety, the emotional temperature, and the needs of everyone else. That is the reality.
Instead of answering that, the Taoiseach pivoted. He brought therapy in schools into the conversation. Speech and language. Multidisciplinary teams. School-based therapy services. Let me be absolutely clear! We desperately need therapists! We desperately need properly resourced multidisciplinary teams. Nobody working in education would argue otherwise. But this is where the fundamental misread happens. Conflating therapy provision with immediate classroom support is either a profound misunderstanding of what actually happens in schools, or a deliberate redirection.
Having one, at best two or three, therapists attached to a school, even if they could be recruited, which they will not be in mainstream, does not change the reality of a neurodivergent child in crisis who needs immediate sanctuary or removal from an overstimulating classroom. Therapy is not the answer to every classroom challenge. Even children who are well supported by therapy and trained in regulation still have intensely difficult moments. And those in-the-moment acts of stopping everything, co-regulating, keeping a child safe, and supporting the rest of the class are not what therapists do. That is day-to-day classroom support. Crucially, this is already playing out in mainstream classrooms. And if we do not even have a properly functioning therapy system in special schools or special classes within mainstream, the idea that this will suddenly exist at scale in fully mainstream settings is simply a pipe dream.
After introducing therapy into the discussion, the Taoiseach then concluded by saying he did not want to conflate therapy in schools with the SNA issue, even though that is exactly what he had just done. Confused? Good. That is the point. This is textbook flooding the zone. Introduce a scheme that is years away from meaningful implementation in mainstream classrooms and present it as relevant to an immediate crisis. It is not. It offers no practical answer to the dysregulated child in a mainstream class right now.
That answer is of absolutely no use to Holly Cairns or to the rest of us trying to grapple with the now-whatness of this moment. Yes, we are told primary care is the only show in town, and fine, we already knew that was the direction of travel. But what now? What about the schools who urgently need to know the next practical steps? How exactly does Micheál Martin imagine all need in a classroom is to be supported, as he keeps insisting it must be, when one teacher is left alone managing multiple needs at once in enormous classes? You will not be calling on a therapist who does not exist. That much is certain.
And this is exactly why political discourse on this has become such a dead end. They cannot say out loud that teachers should just get on with it, but that is effectively what is being signalled. Without any credible commitment to significantly reducing class sizes, or building real flexibility into the system so there are additional adults available for the literal day-to-day management of children, which you need even when nobody is in distress, we are going nowhere. Nowhere.
What is being offered amounts to this: we know you need X, but maybe, sometime in the future, you might get Y. That is not a solution. It is not even a response.
If we are serious about inclusion, then inclusion has to be resourced in real time, in real classrooms, with real adults present. Not promised later. Not reframed as therapy. Not buried in future schemes. Children are in classrooms today. Teachers are in classrooms today. And the system cannot keep pretending that one adult can absorb infinite need