The Assembly has no time for disabled kids, but enough time to discuss TV shows…

From the BBC:

Some parents of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) have said they are “devastated” there is not enough time at Stormont to change the law to mandate support for them when they leave school.

The Health Minister Mike Nesbitt told assembly members that “we have run out of time” to change the law before the next election.

Alma White, whose 18-year-old autistic son Caleb is about to leave school, said young people with SEN were “being failed”.

“I appreciate the honesty from the minister of health but it hurts deeply because more uncertainty looms,” she told BBC News NI.

Nesbitt said there is not enough time between now and purdah, which is a period in the run up to an election when no new ministerial policies can be introduced.

The next assembly elections are due by May 2027.

Can anyone explain why they are out of time when the elections are more than a year away?

Sam McBride had a good report the other week on how the Assembly uses its debating time. From the article:

A month into 2026, Stor­mont’s legis­lat­ive Assembly has found only nine minutes to debate Stor­mont legis­la­tion — and that was a piece of routine sec­ond­ary legis­la­tion to raise the fees for waste man­age­ment.

Over the last two months, the Assembly has debated Stor­mont legis­la­tion in the Assembly cham­ber for just over two hours.

The order papers for next week’s sit­tings show no change: There isn’t a single piece of Stor­mont legis­la­tion down for con­sid­er­a­tion. Instead, there’ll be mean­ing­less debates on end­ing aca­demic selec­tion and cre­at­ing a sports museum — neither of which will change any­thing.

Legis­la­tion is simply not com­ing from the Exec­ut­ive for the Assembly to scru­tin­ise. Instead, the order paper is pad­ded out with often point­less private mem­bers’ motions and adjourn­ment debates.

Already this year, MLAS have found Assembly time to talk about The Trait­ors TV show, Don­ald Trump, flags (of course), ‘blue Monday’, BBC bias, and Venezuela. But debat­ing legis­la­tion is a step too far for a legis­lat­ive assembly, appar­ently.

There have to be red lines in any society, and a key red line for me is that you can’t f*ck over disabled kids. Our MLA’s should really hang their heads in shame at this one. That presumes they have any shame, of course.

Brian O'Neill

Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.