An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-24 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach I agree with Senator Flynn. Senator Tully and I, among other Members of this House, have done an awful lot of work in the education committee around dyslexia and dyspraxia, and we have met young people and seen the opportunities for them. Their disabilities, as some people might call them, are actually their superpowers and we have to give them the opportunity to realise that power. I raise today the venerable status of Fr. Flanagan from Ballymoe in County Galway, conferred yesterday. He was born in 1886 in the diocese of Elphin, my home diocese. After completing his secondary education in Sligo, he emigrated to the United States and became a priest in the diocese of Omaha. In 1917, he founded Boys Town, a non-profit Nebraskan centre dedicated to offering children, particularly the neediest and most helpless, a new start in life. Many people know the "Boys Town" movie as well. This is another step in Fr. Flanagan being recognised as a saint. That brings me on to the driving lesson delays we are starting to see creep up again. Last September, the Minister of State committed to a ten-week lead-in time for driving tests. At one stage in recent months, Roscommon was down to six weeks. I now see we are at eight and a half weeks, but many other counties are still well above the ten weeks. I hope it is not going to need the sainthood of Fr. Flanagan to address that issue. I hope it is something that we can address before the summer. I would love if we could have a further debate on that. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-03-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:46+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-24