The report of the Task Force on Autism is a remarkably detailed document. It presents an exhaustive list of over 150 recommendations. And it ranges across complex legal and constitutional issues.
But the report also conveys powerfully the situation which confronts the parents of autistic children. Autism, it says, "enters the lives of families uninvited and unannounced. By their very nature such orders are initially unobserved, silent and hidden. There are no apparent signs at birth and there is no warning to alert parents to what lies ahead."
The report makes it abundantly clear that the task facing parents has not been helped by the grossly inadequate provision made by successive governments over generations. In this State, it says, even "diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorders remain problematic with significant delays being the norm in many instances". Some children, with milder forms of autism, are not diagnosed until adolescence or later. "This delay is unsatisfactory and unacceptable."
The report is also impressive in detailing how parents are often marginalised in the process involving the assessment and treatment of their child. There is, it says, a "repeated practice where decisions are routinely made" during meetings/case conferences before "parents are invited to join health or education teams for the final stages of such meetings".
The Task Force itself was established a fortnight after the High Court judgment in the case involving Jamie Sinnott and his mother, Kathryn. In his High Court ruling, Mr Justice Barr exposed, with forensic precision, the shambolic nature of educational provision for autistic children.
The Government was badly bruised by the Sinnott ruling. It established the Task Force to chart a way forward and, critically, promised it would be free to report without any political interference.
In this regard, it would seem that the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, has been as good as his word. In recent weeks, senior figures in the Department were even reluctant to check on the delivery of the report, lest this would be construed as "interference" with its deliberations. The Task Force, chaired by Ms Sheila Drudy, professor of education at UCD, bases its report on four key principles:
School placements, supports and educational interventions should be based on the needs of the child.
Educational interventions should be empirically defensible, flexible and in line with international good practice.
Special education is a service, not a place.
Parents should be fully involved in any educational intervention.
In their submissions to the Task Force many parents outlined the frustration which awaited them as they sought to do the best for their child. One parent cited in the report said: "The burden should not be on parents to shuttle between the Departments of Health and Education, neither of whom takes exclusive responsibility for the provision of services." The report recommends that parents must have right of access to all information regarding the case history of their child. They must, it says, be involved in a "full and meaningful way in the placement of their children whether in mainstream schools, special schools or residential centres of any kind".
Critically, the report underpins the proposal by the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities which states that parents have primacy in the decision-making process as soon as their child has been identified.
The report would appear to imply that parents can opt either for education under the TEACH system, the method for teaching disabled children generally favoured by the Department and which involves a six to one pupil-teacher ratio.
Or they can opt for the Applied Behaviour Analysis system (ABA) where children gain one-to-one tuition. Some campaigners believe the Department is opposed to ABA because of the higher costs involved.
As the Task Force was completing its report last summer, the Supreme Court overturned the High Court ruling in the Sinnott case. It ruled that the State was only obliged to make education provision for autistic persons up the age of 18. The ruling angered and dismayed the public and created intense political difficulties for Dr Woods.
The Task Force is implicitly critical of the Supreme Court ruling. It is also critical of the current legal minefield in which parents must thread. In essence, it says that while a whole body of legislation appears to underpin the rights of autistic people, these can be worth little in practice.
The report stops short of the constitutional amendment favoured by Kathyrn Sinnott. Instead, it suggests that "urgent attention should be paid by Government to the need for appropriate constitutional reform" to provide clearer provision for the rights of the disabled to education. It does say, however, that the constitutional right to education should be "reformulated" with an emphasis on equally effective education for all, regardless of difference.
It also calls for a enactment of a civil rights statute dealing with the educational rights of the disabled. The question now is whether these measures will give the kind of watertight legal guarantees demanded by Kathryn Sinnott and other campaigners.
Sean Flynn is Education Editor of The Irish Times