Cork child with autism faces 30km school commute come September 

The mother of a sixth-class pupil in a North Cork primary school has told The Echo how her son has finally been given a secondary school place in a dedicated autism spectrum/multi-disciplinary unit.

It comes after the family applied without success to 10 other schools in the region.

Odhran O’Sullivan will be attending Mitchelstown CBS as a first-year pupil next September, and this will entail a 30km journey to and from his home near Buttevant each day.

The news comes ahead of a planned protest next weekend at City Hall in Cork which is being organised by the mothers of children with special needs who are seeking a school place in the next school year.

The protest takes place on Saturday at 2pm.

Dara Neary, the mother of Richie, said yesterday that there were at least 17 such children in Cork without a school place for September.

Ms Neary, who hails from Ballygarvan, was present at the sleep-out protest outside the Department of Education last weekend.

Odhran’s mother, Donna, told The Echo that she had encountered bureaucratic difficulties because her son was outside of the catchment area for a number of schools for which she had applied on his behalf.

“I had to apply everywhere because this was the advice I was given by the special education needs officers,” she explained.

“They say apply to every unit, and you might be lucky enough to get one.”

The notification that Odhran had secured a place in Mitchelstown CBS came in mid-February and it was something she hadn’t expected.

“I received an email... to say that Odhran wasn’t in the catchment area for the school and he was placed 22nd on the waiting list for a place, but due to other people accepting other places, [and] other pupils going to college, Odhran was offered a place in Mitchelstown CBS,” she said.

“I was super stressed because I don’t know anything about Mitchelstown.

“It’s 30km from home and, I suppose, it becomes overwhelming because why can’t our son go to a school of our choice just because he was born with additional needs that he had no choice in in the first place?”

However, Ms O’Sullivan said she visited the school the following day and described the principal and her colleagues as “very accommodating and lovely people” and added that she was “definitely more at ease after this visit”.

She described Odhran as on the higher end of the autism spectrum, and as highly intelligent.

Ms O’Sullivan was speaking to The Echo after her son’s situation had been raised in the Dáil by Cork North-Central Labour Party TD Eoghan Kenny.

Mr Kenny said his party had campaigned on an “autism guarantee to secure an appropriate school place for every child and develop a fully inclusive model of education”.

“To realise this means better long-term planning, multi-annual funding, and an overhaul of the Epsen [Education for Persons With Special Educational Needs] Act,” said Mr Kenny.