Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Canney for his questions. I will build on the points made by the Minister, Deputy McGrath. The Deputy touched on the importance of responding to and supporting citizens who have a disability with respect to the particular support they need. I am very aware of this issue.

I have no doubt this will be an important issue when I sit down with the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, in September. One can look at the scale of the change in how, for example, we support those who have a disability or an illness through social protection. In 2012 we were spending €3.3 billion and for 2022 the figure stood at €5.3 billion. That is just a sign of the efforts being made at the moment to support those who are coping with a disability or an illness or who are caring for somebody in such a situation from a living standard point of view and an income point of view. What that means for individuals is we currently have 431,200 recipients of payments designed to support those who have a health need or are caring for somebody who has such a need. Within our health budget the portion of expenditure aimed at supporting those who have a disability is high and as I said, the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, will be raising this with me shortly.

Returning to the point the Deputy made on housing, I emphasise the importance of the points made there by the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, on the apprenticeship programme. This morning I met Skillnet Ireland, SOLAS and the Secretary General of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, which is the Department overseeing all this. There is exceptionally good work going on there. We already have more apprentices either registered or being trained in our economy than we did at other points when our economy was growing really quickly. I participated in a good discussion this morning on the changes we will need to look at to do two things, namely, to encourage more small- and medium-sized construction companies to avail of the apprenticeship opportunities that are there and to get them to provide those and to think about how we can ensure apprenticeship programmes are still seen as valuable and attractive in an economy at full employment where wages are going up. I am very optimistic about what our apprenticeship programme is going to look like within a year. We will play our role and I will play my role in supporting that.

Huge work is likewise under way on modern methods of construction. I am conscious roadmaps tend not to be the most exciting titles for documents, but we now have the Roadmap for increased adoption of Modern Methods of Construction in Public Housing delivery and the work going on in that is really encouraging. The Minister, Deputy Coveney, is going to take the lead in looking at how can build up the scale of this sector within our economy because it will allow us to get the homes quicker, cheaper and they will be more resilient from a climate perspective.

I will end with a real-life example of this. O’Devaney Gardens, which everyone here will be familiar with, is about to move into the next phase of delivering hundreds more homes and most of the homes are being built off-site. They will be constructed in O’Devaney Gardens but not built there. That is an example of the change under way. There is lots of work under way there at the moment.