Yet the Department of Education has no plans to follow the recent recommendation of a United Nations committee that pressed for the speedy implementation of a 2004 law which would mean these resources are automatically put in place.

We do not see the Revenue Commissioners going to the minister for finance every year to seek approval for payment of tax reliefs to the rich — or the not-so-rich — who avail of a range of schemes if the cost in a given year has been underestimated.

But that is what the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) must do each year since 2011, when a troika- imposed restriction was placed on the numbers of SNAs permitted to be funded by the Department of Education. In other words, a certain number of staff are allocated and these have to be distributed as fairly as possible among schools, who in turn must decide what access each child gets to the time and work of an SNA.

While schools will acknowledge there may have been duties assigned to SNAs outside their caring role, this was addressed in a 2011 value-for-money review of the scheme within the department.

That review has led to closer monitoring of how SNAs are deployed within schools and reminders to principals that their SNAs are not for educating pupils, or for helping with administration or other work.

Many of the issues were clarified in a letter to all schools last summer, but another review has been ordered by Ms O’Sullivan this week to examine why there were so many more valid applications for SNA support this year, and whether schools are restricting SNAs to the work for which they are employed.

Previous to the cap on numbers, the NCSE was free to allocate SNA support to a school where it received professional assessment clarifying that a child met the criteria for assistance. And such a model would be allowed to stay in place if the Government decided to bring into effect remaining elements of a 2004 piece of law.

For 11 years, most of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs (Epsen) Act has remained unstarted because it would cost too much to give children with disabilities or other special needs automatic access to their assessed needs.

Its speedy implementation was urged as recently as a fortnight ago by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as part of increased efforts it recommended to enhance inclusive education for all.

The sections of the Epsen Act not yet implemented would entitle all children with special needs to an educational assessment and a resulting individual educational plan, setting out the supports they should receive to participate fully in school.

In response to the UN report, the Department of Education told the Irish Examiner it believes the annual cost of full implementation would be higher than the €235m estimated by the NCSE in 2006 for the education and health sectors.

“In light of the very difficult economic situation and the significant costs involved... the previous government deferred the full implementation of the act,” the department said — more than four years into the term of the present Government.

Any additional funding would be on top of the €1.4bn being spent this year on special education in schools, a significant 17% of Ms O’Sullivan’s 2015 budget.

But as well as ending the waiting game faced by pupils, parents and school staff for SNAs each year, implementing the Epsen Act would mean an end to the 15% cut in place since 2011 to resource teaching hours allocated for pupils with disabilities. That cut would have been 25% from 2013 were it not for a week of front-page coverage of the issue in this newspaper that helped force previous minister Ruairi Quinn to secure funding for additional special education teachers from his Cabinet colleagues.

It is mostly the same people who were around the Cabinet table this week, and who are clapping themselves on the backs for their response to growing numbers of children with disabilities being catered for in schools. On a television programme on Tuesday, Transport Minister Paschal Donohoe — appointed to Cabinet a year ago — said it was a signal of the economic recovery that the Government could sanction extra SNAs.

But when the Department of Education happens to underestimate, for example, the number of students qualifying for college grants — as happened last year when there was a shortfall of €13.5m — the minister can simply bring the case for tweaks to her budget to the Oireachtas education sub-committee. Likewise, there have been occasions when increases in pupil numbers across the school system required additional teachers to be sanctioned, again being approved by committee members.

Yet children with special needs have to await the backing of Government ministers for the same kind of clearance because of a condition imposed by a troika that is no longer overseeing how this country is run.

At a recent debate aimed at informing policy reforms, the Department of Education hosted internationally recognised school reform expert Pasi Sahlberg to address senior civil servants and representatives of education agencies, parents, schools and teachers. A central aspect of his presentation was on the factors behind the success of the school system in his native Finland, which consistently tops international rankings for how teenagers perform in reading, maths and science.

Mr Sahlberg believes its special education system, in which all students receiving special support are assigned an individual learning plan, is a reason for Finland’s world-class ranking. While schools this year had to provide a care plan for each pupil on whose behalf an application for SNA support was based, there is no obligation yet on the State to provide resources set out under any wider individual education plan as set out in the 2004 Epsen Act.

If such a requirement were in place, instead of devising a fairer way to allocate resource teachers whose numbers are also capped by the Government, the NCSE and Department of Education would ensure schools had the right level of support in place as children needed it. But what is planned — and probably not before 2017 — is that schools will be given freedom to deploy a set number of special education teachers among pupils who need it, but still from within a share of what would be a Government-controlled number of such staff.

When this situation ends and when the parents of children with special educational needs can send them to school without having to fight and wait for the supports they require, whoever is sitting around the Cabinet table can legitimately clap themselves on the backs for making this a more equal country.