Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail)

First, I take the opportunity to welcome you back, Deputy, and I am looking forward to our continued engagements. I think we both share a love of west Cork and the people of west Cork, as well as their representatives in terms of quality, calibre and so forth. I am going to miss Deputy Cian O’Callaghan. I thank him for his forensic engagement over the last while.

I also thank Deputy Cairns for her tributes to Councillor Patrick Gerard Murphy, a colleague of ours. We are in deep sadness because Patrick Gerard was a wonderful individual and the definition of what public representation at local level means. He was a man of great and deep insight, commitment, care and compassion, and great courage and bravery as well in terms of his own personal life and as a public representative.

When we said that disability is the top priority of this Government, it is. I accept fully that there are shortcomings, to say the least, in some areas, particularly spinal surgery, assessment of need and the availability of therapies. On the other hand, it is important to create the other side of the narrative as well, that of unrelenting investment in additional needs, particularly, for example, in education in recent years, and exponential growth in services. If we take education alone, the State investment is about €2.9 billion in 2025. That is a 48% increase since 2020 and is a quarter of the entire Department of education budget. We now have 23,000 special needs assistants working in our schools, up 43% in the last five years. We added 1,600 SNAs this year alone. There are 21,000 special education teachers. The number of special classes has doubled to 3,700-plus. We have had 16 new special schools established in the last number of years and 407 new special classes sanctioned for 2025-26.

That represents and reflects investment. It still is not enough. As I said earlier, our population is growing very significantly. If we look at the last two censuses, the most recent one showed a marked increase in the number identifying with a disability, both children and adults.

That means we have to not just increase resources but systemically change as well. To be fair to the Minister, Deputy McEntee, and the Minister of State, Deputy Moynihan, they are already working to change the system for children with additional needs and their families applying for places in schools in terms of a centralised application system being piloted and the time to apply being brought forward by four months so that we have a better lead in time to the subsequent September. I will come back in on the other points later.

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