In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.  

EARLIER THIS WEEK I went semi-viral on Instagram for silently making the above face on the telly.

On Monday with Gavan Reilly we’d been discussing the proposed changes to the law on attaining citizenship – whether they were fair to immigrants already here who had hoped to apply sooner; whether there was any need to replicate the average EU procedure given our dependence on migrants in the labour market; whether a civil and language competency test were reasonable impositions on someone hoping to become a legal equal.

Most sentiments were that the language requirements were reasonable: if we want Irish citizens to be full and empowered participants in society, we’d expect them to have a command of one or other of the national languages. As Aontú’s response said: if you can’t communicate, you can’t assimilate.

In closing the chat, I observed that if we’re to put this much emphasis on a citizen’s ability to communicate, I would stare awkwardly at the camera for a few seconds, as the dad of a pre-verbal seven-year-old who has never received any speech and language therapy from the public health system.

The list gets longer, and longer, and longer

Anyone who follows the news in Ireland will see regular stories about the number of children whose wait for an Assessment of Need (AON) has exceeded the legal limit. By law, any child referred for one is supposed to have completed it within six months. As of the end of June, over 23,000 children were waiting longer than that legally stipulated time.

The government has simultaneously tried to remove the AON as a barrier for services – declaring that it’s no longer........

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