Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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There are international examples of prevalence rates, particularly with autism, and we have no reason to think our population is different.

I was not going to go there but as Ms McNally raised the issue of climate, I will refer to an issue that I raised with the Department at the education committee when we were discussing the public sector performance report. What the industry calls scope three emissions are not factored in by the Department in its siting of schools. I raised this previously. Ms McNally mentioned that the Department works in association with local authorities but we are not planning our new schools as active transport nodes. We discussed this in 2023. It is not the case that we site a new school and build an active travel network around it. We do a lot of retrofitting, which is much more difficult and we often end up with bad quality transport infrastructure. What that also means is that we have an ingrained transport practice. Again, I go back to the example of Tramore. We built a massive secondary school with one road in and one road out. It is the only place in Tramore where one will hit traffic and it is absolutely insane. Poor quality active travel infrastructure was put there. When one considers the enormous investment of the State when we are building new schools, the fact that we are not proactively, in any meaningful way, engaging with local authorities to establish them as active travel nodes is concerning. I am also concerned by the fact that the Department does not consider scope one emissions. When we talk about climate, we talk about building NZEB schools which is fine but we are not considering the emissions arising from travelling to and from school.